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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



TEACHERS COLLEGE LECTURES 
ON THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 

Series II 



THE COMMON FAITH OF 
COMMON MEN 



BY 

ROCKWELL HARMON POTTER, D. D. 

MINISTER TO THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST 

CENTER, CONGREGATIONAL 

HARTFORD, CONN. 



TEACHERS COLLEGE 
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 

NEW YORK CITY 
191 2 



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Copyright, 191 2, by 
Teachers College, Columbia University 



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CONTENTS 

CHAPTER 

I The Man from Everywhere . 
II The Faith for Everyman 

III The Work in Every Field . 

IV The Hope of Every Heart . 
V The Prayer for Every Place 



3 
26 

48 

77 
105 



THE COMMON FAITH OF 
COMMON MEN 



THE MAN FROM EVERYWHERE 

The Universal Need of Man for Faith 

There have been two men from Macedonia 
who have left their mark on the world's his- 
tory. One was Alexander, the man of blood 
and iron, who led the hosts of the new 
world, the forces of the Greek peoples, 
against the tottering monarchies of the 
East. He mightily avenged the Greeks who 
fell before Persian hosts at Thermopylae, 
at Marathon, at Salamis and Plataea. He 
put an end forever to the dream of an 
eastern conquest of Europe. Dying at 
thirty-three years of age he has become in 
the world the type of the victorious soldier. 
But tradition tells us that he died in dis- 
illusionment and despair. So his life has 
passed into a proverb, and we say of sighing 
though sated life that it is like to the life of 
Alexander who wept for more worlds to 
conquer. 

3 



4 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

The other man from Macedonia was the 
man of a dream and a vision. He bears no 
other name than this title with which he is 
recorded in history, the Man from Mace- 
donia. No eyes ever saw him in flesh and 
blood. His hand gripped no tool and laid 
hold of no weapon. He was indeed of such 
stuff as dreams are made of, but he remains 
a mighty figure, typical of the hopes and 
prayers and deeper desires and inmost needs 
of all the people of his rugged land, of all 
the Greek tribes, his kindred, of all Euro- 
pean peoples. His hands are reached forth 
in a piteous appeal ; on his brow there is the 
mark of a dumb anguish ; in his eyes there 
is a speechless yearning. This man from 
Macedonia was seen but once and by one 
only, yet for two thousand years the mem- 
ory of that vision has inspired the loftiest 
endeavor, the holiest consecration of the 
western world. Because of the appeal of 
those hands and the yearning of those eyes, 
Paul crossed the Hellespont. Following him 
came the host of the apostles, the prophets 
and the martyrs. Through all the islands of 
the Aegean, over the mountains of the 
Morea, across the waters of the Adriatic, 



THE MAN FROM EVERYWHERE 5 

along all the rough shores of southern 
Europe, up through the passes and scaling 
the fastnesses of the great mountain barrier 
that lies across the continent, and sweeping 
down upon the plains through the mighty 
forests where our fathers were awakening 
from the brutish sleep of ages, they came 
in answer to the call of the man from Mace- 
donia, seen but once and by one only. Still 
across the seas and over the land they come, 
led by the vision, the saints and the seers, 
the preachers and the teachers, the mission- 
aries and the ministers, the sacrificial host 
of the countless ones who serve — they are 
penetrating every jungle, they are bursting 
open every barred gate, they are seeking 
out every slum, they are finding the aged 
and the weary, the hurt and the crippled, 
the maimed, the lame and the blind, the 
sinsick and soul-hurt everywhere, and all 
this because the man from Macedonia, seen 
but once and by one only, still appeals from 
his speechless eyes and his dumb hands 
with the words that were heard by Paul, 
**Come, help us/' 

Who was the man from Macedonia ? Why 
did Paul see him? As the great apostle 



6 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

preached in the synagogues of the Greek 
towns on the coast of Asia Minor he had 
chance to see many men from Macedonia. 
The Hellespont was no barrier to commerce ; 
its waters were flecked with the boats of its 
passengers. The Aegean with its islands, 
perilous in its rage but winsome in its calm, 
was like a stream set with stepping-stones 
over which constant intercourse brought 
hosts of men from every ancient Greek pro- 
vince. These men passed Paul in the street 
without so much as a word. If they stopped 
to notice that a little Jew with an eloquent 
tongue was speaking concerning his little 
religion to a little group of his crafty kins- 
men, they dismissed the incident with a 
shrug of the shoulders and the contemp- 
tuous word, ' ' Barbarian. ' ' When Paul with 
his keen human interest studied them in the 
market-place where they traded and got 
gain, in the schools of the philosophers 
where they disputed and got wisdom, there 
was to the eyes of those who stood with him 
no sign of need on the faces of these well- 
dressed men from Macedonia. They bought 
and sold, they ate and drank, they laughed 
and sang as men perfectly satisfied with 



THE MAN FROM EVERYWHERE 7 

their lot. If any man had said to them, 
''You need help/' they would have laughed 
him to scorn. If any man had told them, 
''You are seeking guidance,'' they would 
have cursed him to his face, and yet when 
Paul in his narrow chamber ; waking through 
the night watches, meditated on what he 
had seen of these powerful men from the 
West, he heard the still, sad music of 
humanity, he caught the sigh of hearts bur- 
dened and of lives restless. His eyes had a 
glimpse of this piteous figure, the man from 
Macedonia, and he felt in his soul the silent 
appeal, "Come, help." 

Paul was sensitive to this appeal because 
of the experience through which he himself 
had passed. He knew what it was to pass 
from pride to humility. He knew what it 
was to be self-satisfied in the eyes of the 
world and within to be all restless and dis- 
traught with the surges of the stricken 
soul. He knew also what it was to hear a 
voice saying, "Peace, be still," over the 
troubled waves and the raging billows of 
that inward storm. An experience had come 
to him which had taught him the meaning 
of the restlessness and the despair which had 



8 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

been concealed beneath the stolidit)^ and 
seeming virtuousness of a Pharisee. He had 
been shown the inhumanity and cruelty of 
that old bitter spirit of racial pride and 
racial hatred. He had learned the utter 
uselessness of religious practices which per- 
sisted solely as social or ceremonial rites. 
He had felt the worthlessness of a life lived 
without the conscious fellowship of God. 
But in the moment when he had thus real- 
ized the curse of his old life, at the moment 
when his disillusionment was complete, he 
had learned also the joy of a life that leaps 
up above its old self into friendship with the 
Eternal. In this new experience he had felt 
all exclusive racial pride pass out of his 
heart, and in place of age-long bitterness 
toward all non -Jewish people, there had 
come to him a sense of kinship with all 
nations. In that moment also he pene- 
trated beneath the outward show and mean- 
ing of ancient ceremonial rites and found 
the joy of a soul that enters into a spiritual 
experience of communion with God. So 
simple, so primitive, and so elemental was 
this experience that he leaped at once to the 
conviction that it was truly human, and so 



THE MAN FROM EVERYWHERE 9 

universal. What had come to him had so 
deeply met his needs and so richly crowned 
his life, had so closely knit him in thought 
and heart and will to the life of the world 
and of man and of God that he could not 
doubt it to be the destiny of all men to 
enter into a like experience. This was the 
reason he could see the man from Mace- 
donia: it was because his eyes had been 
anointed with the grace of the gospel. He 
could hear the appeal of the man from 
Macedonia because his ears had been un- 
stopped by the hearing of the blessed pre- 
cepts and the holy promises of the man 
from Nazareth. He knew what the man 
from Macedonia needed, though all uncon- 
scious of that need, because his own life 
had experienced so blessed a ministry to 
its unconscious need. He could diagnose 
the disease because he had himself been 
cured. 

Now history confirms the accuracy of his 
diagnosis. Europe was waiting for help. 
Her old altars were broken down or de- 
serted ; her old faiths were outworn ; her old 
creeds were forgotten. They had lost their 
simplicity and so they had lost their power 



lo COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

to serve. Paul bore with him over the 
Hellespont the gospel which poured its life 
into the decadent civilization of southern 
Europe and gave it that new" birth which 
has been fruitful in transmitting its life 
through sixty generations until that gospel 
is implanted in all the world to-day. That 
this is so is due to the spiritual intuition of 
Paul. He could see impoverishment of the 
spirit within the affluence of the flesh. He 
could feel the restlessness of the heart be- 
hind the composure of the countenance. He 
could hear the moan of despair beneath the 
crackling laughter of a surface merriment. 
For the man from Macedonia was some- 
thing more than he seemed. He was not a 
solitary figure seen but once and by one 
only, who appeared in history to lead a new 
born faith out of its swaddling clothes in a 
provincial nation into the field of its world 
conquest. He was not only the man from 
Macedonia ; he was also the man from Italy 
and the man from distant, misty Spain and 
the man from forest covered Germany and 
the man from the far-set islands of Britain. 
He was not only the man from Macedonia, 
he is also the man from Europe and the man 



THE MAN FROM EVERYWHERE ii 

from America. He is the man from Africans 
plaints and the man of China's millions; he is 
the man from everywhere. Wherever he is 
— and he is everywhere — ^his hands are 
reached out in piteous appeal, his brow is 
creased with the anguish of great desire, his 
eyes are eloquent with the language of a 
great petition. His mind searches for truth ; 
his heart yearns for love; his hands reach 
for service, and mind and heart and hands 
will not have rest or joy or peace until truth 
and love and life are given him in some great 
gospel of God, large enough to fill his 
imagination, deep enough to exercise his 
love, and true to the nature with which the 
years of God have endowed his being. 

O yes, I know, the man from everywhere, 
the man from Peking, the man from New 
York, looks just as self -contented, just as 
smugly self-satisfied as the Macedonian 
traders who brought down their wares to 
exchange them for the silks and jewels of 
the Orient, on the eastern shores of the 
Aegean. The man from everywhere walks 
our streets with clothing of the latest cut; 
he rides our thoroughfares in cars of next 
year's model; he fills our offices and stores 



12 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

with the smartness and cleverness of his 
strictly up-to-date demeanor and habit ; he 
crowds our shops through the days and our 
streets on a Saturday night and on his lips 
there is slang that is borrowed from 
the latest play, and there are phrases 
that are picked up from last Sunday's 
comic supplement. Yes, he is very 
much up-to-date, this man from every- 
where. He marches in the Durbar at Delhi; 
he works revolutions along the Yangste in 
China and threatens the old Manchu 
dynasty with its final exit and the entrance 
of a constitutional monarchy. He stirs up 
revolts in South American republics and 
talks of the new age on the plains of Russia. 
He overturns and in turn tyrannizes, now 
here, now there, in all parts of the known 
world, civilized or uncivilized. He weaves 
the mighty fabric of the world's industrial 
order with crashing shocks like to the noise 
of Titans wrecking or building worlds. He 
is surely very much up-to-date, this man 
from everywhere. He sings and he swears, 
he stalks and he swaggers, and those who 
cannot see when they look at him, would 
say, ' 'he is in need of nothing' ' . But let Paul 



THE MAN FROM EVERYWHERE 13 

look at him and he reports, ''Behold in the 
visions of the night the man from every- 
where appeared unto me saying, Xome 
over into everywhere and help.' '' 

If our eyes are not clear and strong to see 
the man from ever^^where, the universal 
need of man for real fellow^ship with God, 
then let the story of the world's great faiths 
assist our vision. Wherever man is, man 
prays. The only definition of man that is 
truly comprehensive is this, ''Man is the 
animal that prays.'' The search for God, 
the thirst of the mind for truth, the reach 
of the heart and life for love and faith — 
this has not been without witness among 
any people in any place since the beginning 
of the age. The primitive religious prac- 
tices of half -savage barbarous peoples which 
slowly coalesce into great ethnic faiths, 
which are progressively refined as civiliza- 
tion advances until by them there is con- 
structed a pantheon of deities like those 
that sat upon Olympus, or an ethical code 
like that of Confucius, or a devotion to a 
religious ordering of life and a fiery zeal like 
that of the Hindus — these all bear witness 
to the universal religiousness of man's 



14 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

nature, and in the measure in which, under 
varying forms, in different ages, and through 
manifold practices, these faiths have appre- 
hended the truth of the nature of God and 
of his relation to man — in that measure 
have these faiths given peace and joy to the 
man from everywhere. The spiritual rest- 
lessness and yearning of the w^orld to-day 
is but testimony to the extent to which 
these faiths have failed to give unto man a 
true fellowship with God. 

If such an attempt to survey the life of 
man be too broad an induction to give con- 
viction to our conclusions, let us aid our 
effort to see the man from everywhere by 
turning our eyes within. We may do this 
with the more assurance because we have 
already in this day reached the conviction 
that humanity constitutes one family, that 
there is a real brotherhood of man, evi- 
denced in the moral and intellectual kinship 
of the race, which, deep beneath all surface 
distinctions, binds together the men of the 
world. When thus we turn within we find 
a mind that seeks by the inevitable com- 
pulsion of its own nature to discern truth. 
From the vantage ground of what is known, 



THE MAN FROM EVERYWHERE 15 

our minds reach ever with adventurous ex- 
cursion into the vast territory of the un- 
known. Bit by bit chaos and the dark are 
driven back. In the field of history year by 
year, generation by generation, epoch by 
epoch, the mind, adding to the treasured 
store of the past, reaches its insight farther 
into those misty reaches which are covered 
by the veil of the past. Coming clearer and 
clearer into focus as the instruments of in- 
vestigation are adjusted, appears the true 
perspective of men and events. Motives are 
brought into light, causes hitherto unknown 
or dimly suspected are perceived acting in 
and upon the progress of the race. In the 
field of science fact after fact is added to 
the territory of man's knowledge, and prin- 
ciple after principle newly discerned binds 
up man's new acquisition with that which 
he has before attained, as the ribs of rock 
lock the headlands to the shore. But each 
generation in turn reaches its land's end. 
Beyond the sure standing-ground of what 
is known reaches the sea of the unknow^n, 
covered with mists and shadows out of 
which here and there some shining thing 
beckons, but into which sure knowledge 



i6 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

must wait long to build its way. Halting 
there on that margin the mind of man asks 
for the assurance of the ancient Psalmist 
concerning the realm of the unknown. The 
very ground that seems stable under its 
feet dissolves into unreality unless the mind 
reach sure conviction such as was given to 
the singer of old when he cried, '*The sea 
is His and He made it." Unless the mind 
can be sure that the vast of the unknown 
lies in the hand of Him that has revealed 
the known, all knowledge becomes envel- 
oped in the shadows and fogs that sweep in 
from that sea. The alternative for the man 
from ever5rwhere is faith or universal scep- 
ticism. 

Again when one looks within himself to 
find the man from everywhere he beholds a 
heart that yearns with affection or grows 
dark with hate or cold with indifference. He 
finds that life is worth while in proportion 
as the heart finds a worthy object for its 
love and leads the life to expend itself upon 
the object of its love. The feelings of the 
heart reach out toward ideals and persons. 
As they exercise themselves toward ideals, 
man achieves art; as they exercise them- 



THE MAN FROM EVERYWHERE 17 

selves toward persons, man realizes love, 
and knows that life is worth the living, for 
love validates itself to both the heart and 
the mind. Deeper and deeper in experience 
does man follow the guidance of his heart, 
until in the bloom of his youth he is 
devoted utterly to the ideal in the great 
crisis of his moral life, and merging his ideal 
into a person, he devotes himself also utterly 
to that person with the pledge of a life sac- 
rificed. Thenceforward in widening ranges 
of endeavor he seeks to realize his devotion 
of himself to the ideal as he follows its pur- 
suit through the field of his chosen form of 
self-expression and does his daily task. 
Thenceforward also in wider and wider 
ranges of life and in a more and more 
spiritual form of realization is man led by 
his heart to give himself in affection to 
persons, until his citizenship becomes world- 
wide, and what began in the intimate com- 
munion of the family reaches its crown in 
a spiritual fellowship that includes all the 
children of men. In the degree in which 
this development of man's power to love 
has free course and achieves its whole way, 
in that degree does life seem to him worth 



i8 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

the living. But if, when all its way has been 
traversed, there come to him doubt as to 
the worthiness of the ideal to which he gave 
himself, or the persons for whom his life 
had been poured out, then all the wine of 
life is changed to bitterness. The heart 
going its way stands suddenly at the edge 
of the grave, or, after the years, at the sum- 
mit of its achievement, and asks insistently 
for assurance that its sacrifice has not been 
in vain. If love has learned to rest upon its 
ideal in the spirit and has reached through 
persons to lay hold upon that ideal in the 
Person of God, then faith and hope crown 
love through all the way and at the last. 
But if love never learns so to find its final 
goal, it sinks back now and again through 
all the way and at the last, and all that it 
has done and been seems but a precious 
thing cast into the void. The alternative 
for the man from everywhere is a love that 
learns that God is love, or a pessimism that 
shadows all of life. 

When we look within for the man from 
everywhere we find also the power to do 
and to be, that sacred and holy prerogative 
of choice which is granted to each of us and 



THE MAN FROM EVERYWHERE 19 

which sometimes invites us as a gracious 
friend who opens a door of opportunity, and 
sometimes compels us as a stern taskmaster 
who orders us into one or the other of two 
tragic paths. Obscure it as we may, the 
essence of life lies in our prosecution of the 
tasks which choice brings to us. Blame 
others as we may, upbraid chance and 
change and circumstance as we do, all of 
us know in the naked moments of the soul 
that we are what we have made ourselves ; 
that whatever of worth there is in us is all 
compact of the choices we have made which 
have been so deep within us as to be beyond 
the reach of any human eye. Realizing this, 
we cry otit for one who can judge us by this 
intimate judgment, who can pass verdict 
upon us in this hidden place. Our nature 
is such that we ask to be tried and tested to 
see if there be any w^orth in us, and we crave 
the decision of a perfect wisdom and a per- 
fect love upon that structure which we have 
builded so far Vv^ithin, and often so different 
from all that human eyes can see or human 
judgment value. This is the ultimate appeal 
of humanity to God. This is the meaning of 
all sacrifices whose smoke has curled up- 



20 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

ward from the beginning of the world of 
man. This is the sure instinct of the soul 
that will not be satisfied until its case has 
been laid before the highest and the best. 
This is the key to the progress of civiliza- 
tion out of savagery into the kingdom of 
God. It is the faith of humanity that God 
does judge human effort with perfect wis- 
dom and perfect love. The alternative for 
the man from ever3rwhere is progress in this 
faith and bj^ this faith on into the kingdom 
of God, the brotherhood of man, or the pain- 
ful retracing of his steps under the cloud of 
pessimism and through the night of uni- 
versal scepticism, back into primitive sav- 
agery and the brutish sleep of the beasts. 
If this attempt to see the man from every- 
where within has involved itself too intri- 
cately in the coiling speculations of intro- 
spection, then let us look about us, for he 
is here. Walk upon the streets, mingle with 
the crowds, drift with the masses in the gray 
dawn to their task and toil with them home- 
ward under the evening star to their rest, 
see men in their pleasures and in their pain 
and behold the man from everywhere who 
needs above all fellowship with the life of 



THE MAN FROM EVERYWHERE 21 

God, but who is ofttimes, alas, unconscious 
of his real need and conscious only of that 
which the oldtime poet put into his much 
abused phrase, ''An aching void the world 
can never fill." For, believe me, it is true 
that here and everywhere many fine clothes 
are worn over aching hearts, many an 
elegant establishment is the mask of a 
broken spirit, many a careless song lilted 
on the street, many a braggart oath defiling 
the common air and outraging common de- 
cencies — these are but crude attempts to 
smother a sigh w^hich breaks up from the 
great deeps of the hearts of men and asks 
for comfort and for healing. 

Men indict our age as an age mad in the 
pursuit of happiness. He who has vision to 
see will discern that the mad rush for 
pleasure, the ceaseless touring of the rich, 
the restless excursioning of the poor, the 
lavishing of money on costly dinners and 
cheap picture shows — this unslaked thirst 
for excitement which moves the masses of 
our people — which makes the purveying of 
amusement a vast business which artifi- 
cially fans the flames which heat it — all this 
is a symbol, an outward expression of the 



22 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

appeal from the hearts of men for rest and 
peace. It betokens the spiritual impoverish- 
ment, the fear of quietness and of medita- 
tion and of solitude that go with a con- 
science ill at ease and a life unreconciled 
to the mystery of things, the heart of the 
world, the God of life. 

Men point to our common life and declare 
it is dominated by the lust for gold. For 
many this is only too true. The men who 
have are hardened by it, their sympathy 
choked by repeated resistance to the appeals 
of need and want. The men who have not 
are made bitter with envy which ripens 
into a malicious hatred as they observe the 
cruelties of those who have, and reflect upon 
the manifold injustices of the established 
order of things. The give and take of 
ordinary business life, w^hich should be the 
opportunity for healing and helpful con- 
tact between man and man, becomes em- 
bittered and made wearing and biting by 
the corroding effect of the lust for gold. 
Yet he who has eyes to see will understand 
that the lust for gold is only another symp- 
tom of heart hunger. The stingy man is 
the man who is feeding his soul with gold 



THE MAN FROM EVERYWHERE 23 

and wonders why it will not be satisfied 
though it be crammed with this indigestible 
stuff. The violent anarchist is feeding his 
soul with the desire for gold and deludes 
himself with the notion that once he could 
gain that which is starving the soul of the 
rich man by its abundance, he himself 
would know no more hunger. The lust for 
gold is but the perverted need for God, 
which has missed its way on the path of 
life and wanders blindly and will not rest 
until it finds its home in Him. 

It we needed confirmation for these truths 
which are patent in the telling, we can find 
it by the method of science. We can verify 
our theory as to the action of spiritual truth 
upon the soul not less than we can verify 
a chemical reaction in the laboratory. There 
is none of us so poor in his personal rela- 
tionships that he does not know, that he 
has not known, some happy people of 
whom he cannot think as seeking happiness ; 
blessed souls who took God's law as the 
way of life because they found therein 
God's love made known and interpreted 
through the gospel. For these life some- 
times led over the hills through the sun- 



24 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

shine, and sometimes into the valleys 
through the shadows ; sometimes songs and 
smiles, sometimes sighs and tears, but 
always peace and never thirst; always the 
psalm of thanksgiving and the rest of ' ' Thy 
will be done/' And all of us have known 
some over whom the lust for gold has no 
power. Some of these were rich, but riches 
had hardened not the heart and cut not off 
the sympathies and made not proud the 
life. And some of them were poor, but pov- 
erty made not bitter the barren lot, nor 
resentful the common human sympathies, 
nor suspicious nor violent the outreach of 
the life toward its fellows. In the ways of 
sympathy and service, in the common effort 
to right ancient wrongs, to heal the hurts of 
life and to hasten the coming of the glad 
new brotherhood of the kingdom — ^these 
were joined, rich and poor, heart to heart 
and hand in hand, in a dear fellowship 
wherein one could not say which gave most 
and which received most, so perfect was the 
fellowship of mutual service. 

It is lives like these that keep strong and 
sweet our common life, though the crowd 
is restless and its pleasures are bitter. It 



THE MAN FROM EVERYWHERE 25 

is the presence among us of those who mani- 
fest these soul satisfactions, and not the 
absence among us of those who need all 
things like the Man from Macedonia, which 
makes our life different from that of Mace- 
donia and realizes for us a better day and a 
more blessed fellowship. 



II 

THE FAITH FOR EVERYMAN 

The Universal Appeal of the 
Christian Ideal 

A discerning publishing house has issued 
a series of little books under the title, ''The 
What is Worth While Series.'' In the shop 
window or in the advertising pages of the 
magazine this title catches the eye and 
holds it, for the question is a pertinent and 
perennial question. Few are so thoughtless 
as never to pause and ask this question ; few 
there are who do not sometimes hear its cry 
or feel its point deep within the life. 

It is a very old question. The lay student 

of philosophy, though he advance but a 

little way along the mazy paths of that 

study, discovers that its inquiries are all 

some form of this agelong question. From 

the beginning of man's conscious life it 

seems to have aroused his thought and sent 

26 



THE FAITH FOR EVERYMAN 27 

him forth in search of its answer. The 
ancient philosophers called the pursuit of 
the answer to this question the search for 
the snmmum bonum, and each man's philos- 
ophy was tested by the adequacy of the 
answer which he gave in this search. 

The question is a fair question to put to 
any philosopher or to any religious teacher. 
Whoever comes seeking to show^ the path of 
life must have some answer to this question. 
Whoever would truly enlighten man on his 
mortal pathway must give to him some 
notion as to what is the worthy purpose of 
his life, must be prepared to answer the 
question, What is worth while ? People grow 
soon weary of a philosophy which will not 
grapple with this inquiry. They will listen 
only to those philosophers who do somehow 
undertake to answer this practical question 
and to show them what is worth doing or 
being in life. People grow weary of teachers 
of religion who will not grapple with this 
question ; they insist that he who talks about 
God shall be able to tell the average man 
what God's will is for him, shall be able to 
point out wherein consists the true value of 
his life, shall be able to indicate what is his 



28 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

chiefest good and set him on the path to 
achieve it. 

The response which the preaching of John 
the Baptist won from the crowd that went 
out from Jerusalem to hear him, is the 
response which comes from every crowd 
that is stirred by real preaching, ''What 
then must we do? '' said the publicans who 
heard him; ''What then shall we do? '' said 
the soldiers who heard him; "What then 
shall we do? '' said the average man who 
had joined the crowd and gone out to the 
Jordan as on a holiday excursion. The mind 
when awakened to a consciousness of God, 
when roused to a realization of its power 
of laying hold on things unseen, unheard, 
intangible, cries out with this insistent 
appeal. What then shall we do ? 

Each preacher and teacher answers the 
question in his own way. In so far as each 
is honest and able, these answers are all 
expressions of the one central truth, in- 
junctions of the one imperative duty. For 
Christendom, however, the answer of One 
Man is supreme and sovereign. Christen- 
dom will ever be eager to know how this 
agelong question was put to Jesus and what 



THE FAITH FOR EVERYMAN 29 

Jesus said in answer to it. It is by no mere 
chance that the record discloses to us pre- 
cisely how this question was put to Jesus 
more than once and gives to us also the 
words in which He answered it. The answer 
which He gave on one occasion is of par- 
ticular and peculiar value for us because of 
the occasion on which it was given, because 
of its comprehensiveness and because of the 
history which it has had in the life of the 
Christian Church. The question put to Jesus 
on this occasion took this form : ' ' What then 
must we do that we may work the works of 
God? '' It was put to Him by representa- 
tive men of His people ; it was put to Him 
after a prolonged discussion of the religious 
life on His part and at a time when He faced 
a people remarkably responsive to His 
words and teaching. His answer was a 
comprehensive answer because it dealt not 
with specific things, but with a principle of 
human action. His answer is as applicable 
to-day as it was when He gave it. If it had 
any pertinence then, it has pertinence now. 
If it has no pertinence now, it had none 
then. The answer which He gave has had 
a long history in the faith which Jesus 



30 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

founded in the world. It has been taken 
up by the Church which He inspired to 
organize itself on His principles in order to 
perpetuate His life in the world. It has 
become the test by which His disciples are 
tried to discover whether they be worthy 
to bear His name. Therefore it is important 
to understand the answer which He gave 
to the form in which this agelong question 
presented itself to Him. What He said was, 
' ' This is the work of God that ye believe on 
Him whom He hath sent.'' 

This then is what Jesus thought is worth 
while in the world. This is w^hat He thought 
makes life worth living. This is the supreme 
object of human endeavor, according to His 
view; this is the summum honum of His 
philosophy. True, at another time, in 
answer to the specific question of a partic- 
ular young man who came asking what he 
should do to find eternal life — that is asking 
what He could do to make life worth living 
for him — Jesus gave a specific and partic- 
ular direction, '*Go, sell that which thou 
hast and give to the poor.'' But this was 
manifestly a specific answer to a specific 
question, for but few of mankind are or 



THE FAITH FOR EVERYMAN 31 

have been in the position in which this 
young man was, and to but few of them 
would the fulfillment of the injtmction given 
to this young man be possible. It is true 
that on another occasion, speaking to an- 
other individual. He replied with another 
vocabulary to the same kind of question 
when He said, '*Ye must be bom again/' 
But this answer also was manifestly a 
mystic answer for a mystic mind and is quite 
beyond the comprehension of the average 
man, as it seems to have been, indeed, be- 
yond the comprehension of the wise man 
with the mystic mind who heard it. It is 
true also that on another occasion, in the 
form of a vision of judgment, He declares 
that life's real test is its performance of cer- 
tain human duties, feeding the hungry, 
clothing the naked, visiting the sick and 
imprisoned, and granting hospitality to the 
homeless. But here also it is manifest that 
we have, in a highly wrought literary form, 
with the utmost concreteness, a statement of 
the application of some principle broad and 
deep which has these and many other forms 
of manifestation in life. We come back then 
to this word as Jesus' broadest, clearest 



32 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

statement of His answer to the agelong 
question: ''This is the work of God that 
ye beHeve on Him whom He hath sent/' 

We are puzzled somewhat to understand 
this word of Jesus because we are familiar 
with several uses of the word believe. We 
use it in the first place, familiarly, to denote 
the acceptance of a historic fact, as when we 
say, ''I believe in the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence''; ''I believe in the sailing of the 
Mayflower." By this use of the word we 
mean that we accept it as a historic fact 
that the declaration was made or that the 
Mayflower sailed. We use the word also to 
indicate our acceptance of a scientific hypo- 
thesis, as when we say, ''I believe in the law 
of gravitation." By this use of the word we 
mean that we accept a certain theory offered 
to us as a working theory by which to gov- 
ern our common life or guide our effort to 
attain further knowledge. Now Jesus used 
the word ''believe" not of a fact nor of a 
theory, but of a person. Therefore it is 
manifest that neither of these meanings of 
the word adequately interpret for us what 
He meant when He used it. 

He used it of Himself, for as we read His 



THE FAITH FOR EVERYMAN 33 

words we must accept the identification of 
Himself with ''Him whom God hath sent/' 
That is, the object of the belief which He 
names as the chief good of man is not a 
fact nor a theory, but a Person, and that 
Person is Himself. We have, however, two 
uses of the word ''believe'' when applied to 
persons, so that a further discrimination is 
necessary. We say one to another, "I be- 
lieve in Julius Caesar," or "I believe in Wil- 
liam Shakespeare," or "I believe in Thomas 
Jefferson. ' ' By this use of the word ' 'believe ' ' 
we mean that we accept as historically true 
what is currently reported concerning these 
men, that they were born at such a time in 
such a place, that they lived such a life in 
such a vocation, that they died in such a 
way at such a time and that the influence 
of their life and work has been of such a 
sort upon the common life of men. Now it 
has sometimes been assumed that the belief 
in Himself which Jesus declared is the great- 
est thing in life, the work which may be 
called the work of God, is an acceptance as 
historic of the fact of His life as it is cur- 
rently reported in Christendom. To believe 
that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, as the 



34 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

gospels say that He was born, that He lived 
in Nazareth as the gospels say that He 
lived there, that He wrought in Galilee as 
they say He wrought, and walked in Perea 
as they say He walked, that He taught and 
died and rose in Judea as they say that He 
taught and died and rose there — ^to accept 
these as historic facts is sometimes assumed 
to be Christian belief. But one may accept 
all these as historic facts, literally true in 
every detail, and yet fail of an experience 
that will realize the mystic word that Jesus 
spoke to Nicodemus when He said, ''Ye 
must be born again,'' or the imperative 
word that He spoke to the rich young man 
when He said, '*Go, sell,'' or the beauti- 
ful word that He spoke in the matchless 
parable of the vision of judgment when 
He lined in letters of light those who find 
favor with the Eternal. 

We use the word believe as applied to 
persons in still another sense which gives 
us, I think, a clue to the meaning which 
Jesus put into it, when He spoke this great 
word in the presence of His questioning 
hearers. You are speaking to me of your 
teachers. You tell me of their influence upon 



THE FAITH FOR EVERYMAN 35 

you and of your attitude toward them. You 
say of one, ''I like him/' and of an- 
other, ''I distrust him," of another perhaps, 
''I am amused at him,'' and of another, ''I 
am fond of him." But of one of them you 
tell me, ''I believe in him"; and I know 
what you mean by that, for I know what 
I mean when I say of one of the men who 
taught me, ''I believed in him." I can see 
him yet, his hair white with the snows of 
many years and many sorrows; his figure 
bowed with the weight of much toil. He 
sat upon a plank of oak behind a desk of 
bare boards and taught us Greek. We 
trembled when as freshmen his keen eye 
searched us through and found our weakness 
in grammar and limitations in vocabulary, 
but there was that in him that commanded 
us and whatever tasks we left undone, the 
tasks he set were done. And as we learned 
our Greek we learned respect for our master, 
we sought his counsel, w^e hearkened when he 
paused in a chorus of Euripides to open his 
heart with wise words concerning our path 
in life. We saw his soul of stainless honor 
and his words and presence shamed the 
meanness out of us. And so we came to love 



36 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

the aged figiire that first we feared and the 
men of thirty classes of Union College 
grieved for a friend and master beloved 
when Henry Whitehorn passed over to be 
with the immortals. O, I know what you 
mean when you say you believe in your 
teachers, for I know what I mean when I 
say I believed in him. 

You are speaking to me of your friend 
and you say, ''I believe in him.'' I know 
what you mean. You mean that his will 
and wish claim your obedience; that his 
counsel claims your respect and following, 
that his love claims your heart. You are a 
soldier and you tell me of your commander, 
' ' I believe in him. ' ' I know what you mean . 
You mean that his order claims the instant 
obedience of your life, that his judgment 
commands the reverence of your opinion, 
that his great heart and flashing eyes could 
call you through the gates of death with joy. 

It is this use of the word ''believe'' that 
Jesus emplo3^ed when He spoke His great 
words, ''This is the work of God that ye 
believe on Him whom He hath sent." 
Wrapped up in it were these personal rela- 
tions, these personal values which made it 



THE FAITH FOR EVERYMAN 37 

ring on His lips and have caused it to ring 
down through the Christian centuries on the 
lips of His disciples, ''Believe on the Lord 
Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved/' In 
this word there is a command for the will; 
there is truth for the mind; there is love 
for the heart. This surely is the work of 
God for the whole of man and for everyman. 

The Christian ideal is presented to the 
world in the life and message of Jesus. So 
presented this ideal has its universal appeal. 
It calls to the heart and mind and will of 
men without regard to distinction of class 
or caste or race. Wherever He is made 
known in the life that He lived and the 
work that He wrought and the character 
He achieved and the message He delivered, 
there the souls of men are made bare before 
the beauty that is in Him and they are 
drawn by what is holiest and noblest in their 
natures to give themselves to the ideal re- 
vealed in Him. 

Jesus appears among men as a friend. It 
was so that He appeared first to the men 
that came to know Him in His life. John 
the Baptist presented Him to the circle of 
his followers as a friend, as one whose worth 



:^S COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

he had come to recognize and as one in 
whom he trusted. These first disciples of 
Jesus — Peter and Andrew and James and 
John — ^found in Him, when first they met 
Him, just a friend. There is the wistfulness 
of new and fast -growing friendship in the 
word which they spoke to Him on the day 
they first met Him, ''Master, where dwellest 
Thou? " They wanted to know His home 
because they wanted to follow Him there 
and to stay with Him under the spell of 
the new friendship which they had found 
in Him. It was so that all the men of the 
gospels found Him. So Zaccheus the publi- 
can found Him, as a friend who would share 
his hospitality when no one else would enter 
under his roof. It was so the rich young 
ruler found Him, a friend whose judgment 
on the deepest concerns of life was worth 
asking and would be worth following when 
received. So every man in the gospel story 
found this Jesus, a friend. From these first 
disciples to whom He was made known by 
John the Baptist to Pontius Pilate, who on 
that fateful last day recognized the worth 
of the accused man arraigned in the palace 
courtyard — upon every man He met Jesus 



THE FAITH FOR EVERYMAN 39 

made this impression of worth, of winsome- 
ness, of friendship. 

Now it is true that throughout Christian 
history He has made this same impression 
upon the world. Where He is adequately 
presented, where the record of His life is an 
open book, where His spirit enshrines itself 
worthily in the lives of His followers, where 
His message is freely proclaimed — there He 
is revealed as the friend of man. There is 
that in His character which wins respectful 
attention. From the humblest pagan who 
in a tropic village hears in broken speech 
the story of this beautiful Man, to the wisest 
scholar who in his study ponders the strange 
attractiveness of this character that ever 
shines before his life, whoever comes to 
know Jesus likes Him ; to whomsoever He is 
presented He extends the invitation of a 
pure friendship which offers deeply human 
elements of sympathy, trustworthiness and 
love. 

But whoever begins thus his acquaint- 
ance with Jesus finds that friendship pre- 
sently ripens into something deeper. Those 
fishermen who by the Galilean Lake met a 
new friend, and sought to continue their 



40 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

relations with Him, presently found that 
those relations were transformed. He who 
had been to them a friend and nothing more 
than a friend, straightway began to speak 
to them in the imperative mood and the 
present tense of commands. *'Come, follow 
Me,'' was the word that fell from His lips, 
and strangely enough, this word that fell 
from His lips did not seem harsh to them. 
They left their boats and left their business 
and their father and followed Him, because 
when the command which He gave was 
heard by them they felt it confirmed by the 
voice of conscience within and they knew 
that His command was the command of 
God. Not otherwise did Zaccheus obey 
when his new-found friend, at that strange 
supper table, perhaps without speaking a 
word, delivered the imperative mood and 
the present tense of a searching command- 
ment. The close-fisted, hard-hearted pub- 
lican heard in his own soul an echo of the 
command that came from the presence of 
Jesus rather than from His words, and he 
rose from his place and said unto the Lord, 
"Behold, the half of my goods I give unto 
the poor, and if I have taken anything from 



THE FAITH FOR EVERYMAN 41 

any man wrongfully I restore unto him 
fourfold/' Likewise the young ruler heard 
the imperative mood and present tense of 
an insistent commandment from the lips of 
the new friend and teacher whose counsel 
he had sought. And as he heard those 
words, ''Go, sell,'' he heard also their con- 
firmation at the voice of conscience deep 
within his heart and knew that from the 
lips of this Nazarene peasant God's com- 
mand for his soul had fallen. So it w^as from 
the beginning of the gospel story until its 
close; every man who met Jesus found in 
Him a friend, but in finding a friend, found 
more than a friend. He found also a 
master, one from whose lips came the 
commandments of God, one in whose 
presence the moral law of Jehovah be- 
came insistent and imperative. 

This also has been the experience of the 
Christian centuries. Wherever Jesus is pro- 
claimed and His message is declared, there 
men hear the voice of God, interpreting 
duty, enforcing the moral law, summoning 
the soul to do battle in behalf of high en- 
deavor, rousing all its defences against the 
hosts of evil, strengthening its resistance 



42 COMMOxN FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

to the call of the beast from below, and 
inspiring it to fellowship with the call of 
God from above. So it has been true that 
the Christian conscience, in the history of 
western civilization, has always been sensi- 
tive to its abuses and failures, always been 
active in the progress of man out of chaos 
and the dark unto the light and the order of 
the Kingdom of God. In the presence of 
Jesus sin becomes exceeding sinful. His 
words have wonderful power to detach them- 
selves from the century in which they were 
spoken, from the land and the people where 
and to whom they were uttered, and to be- 
come words of living fire in each generation 
and for every people in all the world. The 
Christian ideal as given to men in Jesus 
makes first its universal appeal to human 
friendship and then asserts its universal 
claim to human obedience. 

Each Christian's experience will confirm 
this character of the Christian appeal. The 
typical Christian is won to an allegiance to 
the Christian faith through an appreciation 
of the worthiness of the character of Jesus. 
The ideal of life displayed in the gospel story 
wins sympathy and affection ; it commends 



THE FAITH FOR EVERYMAN 43 

itself as worthy of the earnest effort to 
achieve it. Under the spell of the beauty 
of this ideal the individual commits himself 
to the Christian faith, he pledges himself 
to seek to follow this ideal through life. 
He will walk in friendship with this Jesus 
whose beautiful life seems to keep company 
with the trustful believer. Now whoever 
has thus undertaken to walk in fellowship 
with Jesus has found that His friendship 
straightway develops into moral mastery. 
Friendship with Jesus cannot remain just 
a friendship; it must become something 
more or it will be something less. For this 
friend insists upon His right to command 
and we can retain His friendship only at 
the price of obedience. For when Jesus 
speaks words of commandment to men, 
conscience reinforces the command and 
whispers within the soul that the command 
of this friend is nothing less than the voice 
of God. To refuse to obey the command of 
this friend is to show oneself unworthy of 
this friendship and therefore it is true that 
friendship with Jesus cannot remain mere 
friendship ; it must become something more 
or it will be something less. 



44 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 



The Christian ideal manifest in Jesus, 
which makes its universal appeal for human 
friendship and human obedience, is mani- 
fest unto men in still another revelation. 
It ministers unto them fellowship with God 
so that Jesus becomes to His followers not 
only friend and master but also their Lord. 
So it was with the men who first met Him 
in the gospel story. They followed Him 
because of their newly won friendship with 
Him; the}^ obeyed Him because this friend- 
ship presently claimed obedience from them 
and the voice of conscience presently con- 
firmed this claim as the claim of God's will 
for their lives. Step by step through the 
gospel story we find them rising to the 
claims of the moral mastery of Jesus with 
an eager and glad obedience. Then we 
find that as they obey their friend and 
master He becomes something more than 
friend and master to them. So it was that 
after they had followed Him and friendship 
had ripened into obedience, He took them 
apart and led them up into a high moun- 
tain and there we are told that He was 
transfigured before them. His countenance 
was changed and His raiment became white 



THE FAITH FOR EVERYMAN 45 

and glistering ; they beheld Him in converse 
with the mighty souls of their nation's past 
and the glory of things unseen and eternal 
was opened full upon their souls as they 
companied with Him upon the mount. This 
experience of the Transfiguration was but a 
type and symbol of what came to be the 
experience of each of those who became 
friends of Jesus in the gospel story and who 
in their friendship became obedient to the 
commands of His moral leadership. To 
each of these He made Himself known as 
worthy to be their Lord, in that He revealed 
to them the meaning of their common life 
and opened full upon them the glory of 
the spiritual universe and so led them into 
infinite and precious fellowship with God. 
This has been the experience, moreover, of 
all those who have followed this path in 
their response to the appeal of the Chris- 
tian ideal in Jesus. These have found that 
the human friendship of Jesus becomes the 
moral authority of Jesus and that the moral 
authority of Jesus becomes the spiritual 
power of Jesus, and that this spiritual power 
of Jesus is exercised to bring those 
whose faith is in Him into a union of 



46 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

heart and mind and will with the life 
of God. 

The mind cannot conceive a more worthy 
object for the exercise of God's life in His 
world than this purpose to make such appeal 
to the life of man as shall win men into 
fellowship with Himself. The universality 
of this appeal is warranted by the worthi- 
ness of it. The Christian consciousness of 
its cosmic significance is warranted by the 
worthiness of its issue in this spiritual fel- 
lowship of human souls with God. Nothing 
else and nothing less is the worthy goal of 
the life of the universe; nothing else and 
nothing less can be the worthy goal of the 
development of human life in the world. 
This issue of the Christian experience in a 
spiritual fellowship of the individual human 
soul with God attests the worthiness of all 
God's ways with the children of men. It 
answers all questions and it solves all prob- 
lems because it is perceived to be so great 
a good as to justify whatever of mystery 
veils life as we know it. 

This then is the work of God: that we 
believe on Him whom He hath sent; this 
is the supreme achievement of the soul: 



THE FAITH FOR EVERYMAN 47 

that we have faith in the Man of Nazareth ; 
this is the key to all noble human endeavor : 
the response of the life to the appeal of God 
made in the Christian ideal as revealed in 
Jesus. This is the work w^hich includes all 
lesser tasks, this is the worthy goal that 
includes all lesser aims that are worthy of 
the human soul. To believe in Jesus with 
a faith in which obedience and trust and 
love are included is to set the soul upon a 
quest which will not be satisfied or cease 
until every good and worthy thing shall 
have been found, until every good and 
worthy task shall have been done, until the 
goal of man's life shall have been reached, 
until the issues of man's life shall have laid 
hold on the eternal things of God. 



Ill 

THE WORK IN EVERY FIELD 

The Scope of Christian Service 

The Christian life is never passive. Jesus 
Himself declared that He came to stir men 
unto activity. His summons is a summons 
to service ; they who hearken to it are like 
the man who sets his hand to the plow, 
they have tmdertaken a task. Before them 
there is set a cross. The path which they 
have entered leads to its goal through sacri- 
fice. Jesus even declares that He is come 
to disturb existing human relationships so 
as to set the father over against his son 
and the son over against his father; to 
bring among men, not peace, but a sword. 
All this is plain indication that the Chris- 
tian gospel which is interpreted solely in 
terms of rest has not been fully interpreted. 
Christianity and Buddhism are directly op- 
posed at this point. If the faith of Gautama 
expresses itself in inertia, the faith of the 

Man of Nazareth expresses itself in action. 

48 



THE WORK IN EVERY FIELD 49 

In undertaking to define the field of 
Christian service, it is important to under- 
stand the BibHcal and Christian conception 
of the relation of the spirit of God to the 
activities of human life. There is such a 
conception of the Spirit of God as confines 
His operations in the world of human life 
to what may be called technically religious 
functions. Such a view of the activity of 
the Spirit finds Him giving counsel to men 
when they engage in the act of prayer, 
quickening their minds and inflaming their 
hearts when they undertake to preach the 
gospel or as laymen to bear testimony to 
its power in their lives. This view of the 
Spirit of God confines His service to men 
to the specifically religious acts of men. 
He is co-operant with the minister and the 
missionary; and with the layman when the 
layman is engaged in distinctively religious 
labor. There is always something esoteric, 
mysterious, and almost magical in the 
operation of the Spirit of God according 
to this view. He has a liking for the 
shadows of cathedral arches or the glare 
of camp-meeting torches; He expresses 
Himself in singular and abnormal lives ; He 



50 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

Spends Himself in great crises by ministries 
to religious leaders, or in far away points 
on the battle line of the Christian advance 
in the world. According to this view, God 
is, in His Spirit, averse to the light of com- 
mon day and the paths of common folk and 
the tasks of common hands. These must 
get on without Him. He bestows Himself 
on the few. 

A reading of even the Old Testament 
scriptures will correct this view of the rela- 
tion of the Spirit of God to the common life 
of man. A great value of the Old Testa- 
ment is the record that it gives to us of the 
relation of Jehovah to the whole of the life 
of Israel. According to this conception 
Jehovah was as much interested in the 
sanitation of the homes of the people as 
in the decoration of the Tabernacle or the 
Temple. He was concerned far more deeply 
for the justice and efficiency of the common 
life than for the succession of the priestly 
class in the Temple service, or the enact- 
ment according to particular description of 
the elaborate ritual of the Temple worship. 
For instance, in the patriarchal story of 
the bondage in Egypt when a great famine 



THE WORK IN EVERY FIELD 51 

threatened the land, it was by the help of 
the Spirit of God that a young Hebrew of 
the captivity was able to forecast the com- 
ing of so great a calamity. And according 
to the writer of the record, it was because 
he had learned to work with the Spirit of 
God that this same young Hebrew had 
developed the financial ability, the execu- 
tive power, the administrative skill, to insure 
the empire against the ruin that was threat- 
ened. In other words, the characteristic 
Hebrew conception of the ministry of the 
Spirit of Jehovah unto men was that He 
inspires men for the work of business or 
administration or statesmanship as truly 
as for what we call distinctively religious 
activity. That is, the Hebrew mind had 
perceived that the laws which controlled 
the flowing of the Nile and the forces which, 
moving in accordance with those laws, pro- 
vided abundance or famine in Egypt — ^that 
these laws and these forces were laws and 
forces of God and that the mind of man 
cannot know these laws or understand these 
forces save as the Spirit of God shall guide 
him in his knowledge and understanding. 
In the same way, it was perceived that the 



52 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

power to wield influence over other men, 
to persuade men to undertake a policy of 
wisdom, is a power which is given of the 
Spirit of God since all men share in par- 
taking in some measure of that same spirit. 
Likewise it was seen that the laws of trade, 
the principles of commerce which govern 
the ebb and flow of material wealth in a 
nation — ^that these also are laws of God, 
to be rightly perceived only by Him who 
has learned to think in harmony with the 
Spirit of God and to be guided in reaching 
His judgments by the good coimsel of that 
Spirit given to his mind and understanding. 
So it is perfectly natural to find that Joseph 
in Egypt, whom we think of as a pretty 
thoroughl}^ secular man, a man of business 
and executive ability, a man of statesman- 
ship and military genius, is written down 
in the record of the Old Testament as a 
man in whom the Spirit of God was. 

Again, a little farther on in the history 
of the Hebrew people there is another 
record which enlarges our idea of the activ- 
ity of the Spirit of God. When the hosts 
of the Hebrews were being led on their 
great national pilgrimage out of Egypt into 



THE WORK IN EVERY FIELD 53 

Palestine, and it was desired by Moses to 
provide a place of worship for the congre- 
gation, it is recorded that Jehovah spake 
unto Moses, saying, *'See I have called by 
name Bezalel, the son of Uri, the son of 
Hur of the tribe of Judah ; and I have filled 
him with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, and 
in understanding, and in knowledge, and in 
all manner of workmanship, to devise skill- 
ful works, to work in gold, and in silver, 
and in brass, and in cutting of stones for 
setting, and in carving of wood, to work in 
all manner of workmanship. And I, behold, 
I have appointed with him Oholiab, the 
son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan; and 
in the hearts of all that are wise-hearted I 
have put wisdom, that they may make all 
that I have commanded thee; the tent of 
meeting, and the ark of the testimony and 
the mercy-seat that is thereupon, and all 
the furniture of the Tent and the table and 
its vessels, . . . according to all that 
I have commanded thee, shall they do/' 
Here is distinctly the recognition that the 
laws of craftmanship are the laws of God, 
that skill in working in wood or metal or 
tapestry is given by the Spirit of God ; that 



54 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

the laws which govern the common Hfe in 
its use of the common things of earth to 
provide for its material basis — ^that these 
laws all are laws of God and are to be truly 
discerned only by the help of His Spirit; 
that the ministry of the Spirit of God is 
not for the few but for the many, that His 
primary work is the guidance of the mind 
and hand of man for the doing of these 
common tasks of life. The dependence of 
all our common life, in these days of the 
marvellous expansion of man's power in 
material things, upon the mighty fabric 
which the industry of the modern world 
is weaving about our lives, should make 
very clear to us this profound Hebrew con- 
ception that the warp and the woof of this 
fabric is struck through with the law of 
almighty God. It is by the guidance of 
His Spirit that men have discovered these 
laws and it is by the good counsel of His 
Spirit that men in obedience to these laws, 
working in material things, achieve a mater- 
ial structure for the common life in which 
the precious treasures of the soul are safe. 
Let me cite one more instance from the 
Old Testament pages, of the large concep- 



THE WORK IN EVERY FIELD 55 

tion of the relation of God to man which 
was characteristic of the Hebrew people. 
The few pages of the Book of the Judges 
are the record which has come down to us 
of something more than a century of almost 
anarchic life through which the Hebrew 
people passed between the settlement in 
the land of Palestine and the establishment 
of something like national order under 
Samuel, the last of the Judges, and Saul, 
the first of the kings. These pages are writ- 
ten with records on which both cruelty and 
lust have left their mark. The times of 
which they give us the history were rude 
and raw times in which the life of the nation 
was seething in a ferment out of which there 
was to come the rich future of that people. 
As we read the story it would seem to us 
that no life could be farther removed from 
the help of the Spirit of God than the life 
of that wild time. What then is our sur- 
prise to find that in the story of one of the 
most red-handed of the men of blood and 
shame who are described to us there, it is 
written that the Spirit of Jehovah came 
mightily upon him. It startles our conven- 
tional notion to find it declared that the Spirit 



56 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

of Jehovah was upon Samson, a brawny bully 
of that rough and ready pioneer life. We 
see him with his rude weapon in his hands 
singing like a maniac, shouting like a mad- 
man in sheer physical excess of rage and 
pride after the slaughter that he had 
wrought. We say of him that the Spirit 
of God could not have used so rough a 
block of humanity in the building of His 
fair temple. And yet when we reflect, we 
shall see that this Hebrew conception of 
Jehovah was really a larger and truer con- 
ception of God in His relation to man than 
much of our conventional Christianity pro- 
vides. Samson's rude weapons and his 
bulky strength were enlisted in defence of 
innocence as he saw it, in behalf of the 
weak as against the strong, for the protec- 
tion of Hebrew homes from invasion and 
pillage by Philistine bandits and marauders. 
When God can find no other instrument 
that will serve, He can use mightily the 
roughest of human material to set forward 
the kingdom of righteousness. He can 
work with the life of any man who will let 
himself be used in the world for His kingdom. 
I have called to mind these character- 



THE WORK IN EVERY FIELD 57 

istic records of the Old Testament in order 
that our idea of God's relation to human 
life and to the work of man in the world 
may be made large enough to give place 
for an adequate definition of the scope of 
Christian service. We must come to see 
that all the work to be done in the world is 
God's work, that from the building of taber- 
nacles and the beating back of anarchy 
from pioneer camps, to the administration 
of the business of an empire and the writing 
of public insurance against national calam- 
ity, there is no honest work in the world 
which is not the work of God Himself, for 
the doing of which His Spirit is not needed 
and in the results of which His purpose is 
not concerned. If it be said that there are 
many men who have done the work of 
statesmen who have not been religious in 
mind or in heart, that some of them have 
been hostile to all recognition of God as 
concerned with their work or with their 
accomplishment of their task, that many 
more have been without recognition of 
conventional religion or organized Chris- 
tianity, one must of course reply that this 
is certainly true. But one can affirm also 



S8 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

that except as these leaders of men, these 
who have wrought in behalf of nations and 
peoples and empires — that except as these 
men have had in their hearts some percep- 
tion of an eternal purpose of good working 
in and for humanity and except as they 
have consciously sought to put the strength 
of their hand and thought at the disposal 
of that deep purpose of good for men, the 
work which they have wrought has proved 
to be not only destructive for themselves 
but also ruinous for those whom they 
sought to serve. While, on the other hand, 
those who have thus sought to put them- 
selves in line with a growing purpose of 
good for all men, whether they have con- 
fessed it to themselves or not, have by 
that very attitude acknowledged before 
men the right relation of the soul to the 
God of all work and of all life. 

Lincoln, whose birth the nation pauses 
to-day to gratefully remember,^ was in his 
lifetime accounted by many to be without 
a religious experience. But who is there 
to-day who can read the record of his public 
utterances without feeling that here was a 

1 This lecture was given on Feb. 12 191 2 



THE WORK IN EVERY FIELD 59 

leader of men whose deepest desire, as he 
himself put it, was to be on the side of 
almighty God in His purpose of good for 
all men. This prophet soul who led this 
nation like a pillar of cloud by day and fire 
b}^ night through the four years of its fear- 
ful baptism of sorrow and of death, was 
forced by the very pressure of the respon- 
sibilities that rested upon him to take 
refuge in the will of God, to open his mind 
and heart to the gentle influence and the 
sweet and wise persuasions of the Spirit of 
God, who ever seeks, striving with men, to 
guide their feet into those paths that lead 
unto the establishment of His kingdom 
upon the earth. 

In like manner it is true that among the 
tens of thousands of the army of the work- 
ers in the industries of the modem world 
there are few that say their prayers as they 
go to their work in the morning, perhaps 
even few that offer conscious, much less 
formal, prayer at any time or anywhere. 
Yet I cannot but think that the honest 
purpose of a strong man to do the day's 
work straight and clean, to refuse to 
''skimp" or ''trim" or "beat" as the slow 



6o COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

hoiirs of the working day pass — I cannot 
but think that this purpose to do things 
''on the square'* and to turn in work that 
shall be *'on the level' ' is a prayer as real 
as most that are offered in Meeting Houses 
or Cathedrals. Of this I am sure, that the 
answer to that prayer is given in such 
ministry of God's Spirit as affects safe and 
honest work at the hands of this mighty 
host. When you and I take the train from 
the great city for our homes we put our 
lives in uttermost dependence upon the 
work of a hundred thousand men who have 
laboured to make our journey safe. Deep 
in the mines and far in the forest they have 
delved with the pick and the axe to bring 
forth the metal and the timber that should 
provide us a way and furnish us a carriage. 
Before the roaring of mighty furnaces they 
have stripped themselves in a hell of fiery 
heat to forge the tensile strength of rail 
and bar and bolt and thread and nut and 
rivet and plate, that speed might be safe 
and life in swift transit might be secure. 
Through the dark night and in the face of 
blinding storm they have patrolled every 
inch of the way ; they have set ten thousand 



THE WORK IN EVERY FIELD 6i 

lamps, to speak out their message of guid- 
ance and of safety, or to blush when some- 
where the hidden wire of danger is touched. 
So we shall come safe home, I believe, be- 
cause among a hundred thousand men 
there were found just a hundred thousand 
who did every man his duty at the place 
where he was set. Surely if service to 
humanity be any measure of service to 
God, unless we have lost the breadth of 
vision which characterized the mind of 
the Hebrew, despite all synods and coun- 
cils, we shall canonize these saints of the 
modem world, successors of Bezalel and 
Oholiab, whose prayers are sometimes in 
the form of what men call curses, but whose 
honest hearts thrill to the call of the Spirit 
of God and who build in the world of 
things a safe home for the children of men. 
The scope of Christian service then is the 
scope of human service. Wherever there 
is honest work to do there a Christian may 
fulfill his Master's bidding, set his hand to 
his plow and run his furrow through and 
out. All work may be Christian service; 
all honest work is Christian service, because 
in its motive it seeks the Christian purpose 



62 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

which is the good of all men, because in 
its method it relies upon the guidance of 
the Christian's God who is Father and 
Friend and Helper of all who in sincerity 
and in truth ask for His guidance. The 
only men who may not have this com- 
radeship of God in their life are the men 
who will not work and the men who will 
not serve the common good. Those who 
are parasites on the life of humanity, drift- 
ing with the dregs at the bottom or with 
the scum at the top, — from these there is 
shut out all fellowship with the groaning 
and travailing of God's Spirit as He seeks 
to establish His dominion among men, and 
from them there is shut out also all share 
in the joy and victory of those who share 
with God His progressive achievement of 
His purpose in the race. Those who will 
not serve the common good — these also 
fail of the fellowship of God. By their 
motive which is self-love and their method 
which is self-dependence, they set them- 
selves over against the Almighty. So they 
build into their work the sure promise of 
its ruin and so, as they build, they sow 
within their own lives the seeds of a cer- 



THE WORK IN EVERY FIELD 63 

tain corruption. The very stars in their 
courses fight against such as these and the 
missing of the noblest goal of man's heart 
and hand is their doom. 

Having recognized how broad is the scope 
of Christian service, we must now recognize 
also its more specialized forms. These forms 
of service are such activities as are used by 
men to hasten the coming of the kingdom 
of God, to establish among men the reign 
of reason and love, the release from every 
bondage of the body and the mind unto the 
liberty of those who are bound to the will 
of God. The common life, as we know it, 
is far from realizing the perfect order of 
God's purpose. It must be patiently and 
persistently amended, renewed, and, indeed, 
recreated, if it is to fulfill the purpose of 
God's love for men and achieve the glory 
of His kingdom on the earth. Therefore it 
is that the Christian faith as a world reli- 
gion has challenged the world order and 
seeks by the continuous, persistent pres- 
sure of centuries to re-shape that order until 
it shall conform to the purpose of God. It 
is not needful to attempt to survey his- 
torically the phases of this struggle which 



64 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

is perennial throughout Christendom and 
which is becoming continuous and unceas- 
ing throughout all the world. It is needful 
only to have in mind that this is the mean- 
ing of real Christian service, that it seeks 
the recreation of the order of human life in 
accordance with the purpose of God. 

Here again our current notions of Chris- 
tianity are being broadened and deepened 
to make way for this larger conception of 
Christian service. In the first decade of 
this twentieth century there seems to be 
evident a new appreciation of the meaning 
of much of the movement of the common 
life as related to the ministry of the Chris- 
tian faith in the world. For instance, in 
the field of politics there are three charac- 
teristic ideas which are emerging in the 
consciousness of the nations. All three are 
distinctively Christian, and it is increas- 
ingly recognized that service in behalf of 
these ideas and of their respective ideals is 
truly Christian service. 

The first of these ideas is the idea 
of democracy. In our Western World 
this idea has for four hundred years 
been coming to its own in the common 



THE WORK IN EVERY FIELD 65 

life. In succession, religious democracy, 
political democracy, and industrial democ- 
racy have laid their claims before the 
Western World, and each of these claims is 
being progressively realized. The idea of 
democracy now makes it way back through 
the nations of the Orient until at this 
moment its striving is felt at the very heart 
of mighty China. When it is perceived in 
these nations of the Far East, it is clearly 
seen to be related to the intellectual fer- 
ment caused by contact with the Christian 
ideas and ideals of the West. We may not 
doubt that, though this relationship is more 
obscured in the Western World, and though 
our position is not such as to give us right 
perspective in seeing it, it nevertheless 
exists. Whoever among us serves the cause 
of religious or political or industrial democ- 
racy by removing old abuses, by clearing 
away the clinging growths of tradition or 
prejudice, by recreating the organization of 
life so that every man may speak his own 
word and every man's word shall count for 
one and no man's word shall count for more 
than one, — whoever among us thus lends 
his hand or his voice or his presence to the 



66 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

recognition of the value of the individual, 
of the sacredness and worth of each man's 
mind and heart, is rendering Christian ser- 
vice. His eyes may be so intent on the 
task that engages his hand or the problem 
that enthralls his mind that he cannot see 
the standard under which he is serving. 
His arm may be so valiantly engaged with 
his weapon in the fight that he cannot see 
the banner under which he attacks his foe. 
But the emblem on that standard is the 
emblem of the cross and the name upon 
that banner is the name of the Man of 
Nazareth, whether the standard and banner 
are lifted in the so-called Christian metrop- 
olis of our so-called Christian nation, or 
whether it be set over against the harem of 
the Sultan in the sick empire of the East, 
or pitched without the fortifications that 
shelter the gray and hoary tyranny of the 
Manchus in the heart of Asia. 

The second idea characteristic of the 
political life of our time is the idea of world 
organization which expresses itself in the 
movement for international peace. While 
this movement may have had its birth in 
the horror of the sensitive conscience in 



THE WORK IN EVERY FIELD 67 

the presence of the physical suffering and 
waste of war, its real motive lies rather in 
the perception that physical force can never 
be the arbiter of essential justice. Physical 
force and its supreme expression in human 
life in war, have sometimes been used by 
the spirit of God's justice in the life of the 
race to achieve progress for humanity. But 
it has ever been a blundering tool and 
grievous have been the hazards of its use. 
Every man knows in his heart now that 
might does not make right, and this knowl- 
edge of the dominance of spiritual principles 
over material things will presently write 
itself into the organization of the world. 
For the peace movement of the world is not 
merely a movement of protest. It is a pos- 
itive movement which reaches forward 
toward an ideal, the gleams of which have 
long been shining on the eastern horizon 
and the light of which is now climbing the 
distant hills. This ideal is such a world 
organization as shall fulfill the Christian 
conception of a kingdom of God in which 
all peoples shall find citizenship. Twenty 
Christian centuries have corrected the Chris- 
tian perspective and now we see that this 



68 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

ideal is no mere mirage of a spiritual fellow- 
ship in a future life, but is an ideal which 
is to be achieved in this world as soon as 
the response of the hearts of men to it shall 
become sincere and earnest and universal. 
All service rendered in behalf of this ideal 
is Christian service. It were a shame for 
us to give the name Christian to those 
misdirected efforts of the medieval world 
to extend the formal dominion of so-called 
Christian kingdoms by the weapon of the 
sword, and to refuse the name Christian to 
the service of modern statesmanship which 
seeks by the weapons of the spirit, by right 
reason and the persuasions of justice and 
mercy and truth, to extend the real dominion 
of the Christian ideal until it shall include 
the modern peoples of the world. 

The third idea that is characteristic of 
the political life of our generation is the 
idea of the conservation of the individual 
life. Through manifold voluntary associa- 
tions, in the organization of municipal gov- 
ernment, in the legislation and administra- 
tion of states, and in the policies of the 
nation, this idea has been increasingly prev- 
alent and is coming to be increasingly dom- 



THE WORK IN EVERY FIELD 69 

inant. There is a new sense in the world of 
our time of the worth of the individual, of 
the preciousness of the treasure of his life. 
Attention is being directed to the rate of 
infant mortality, to the prevalence of con- 
tagious or industrial or occupational disease, 
to the sanitation of homes and streets and 
cities and districts, to the conditions of the 
common life which lower human efficiency, 
of mind or heart or will, to the possibili- 
ties of those conditions and environments 
which w411 heighten efficiency by giving 
chance for bodily health and growth, for 
mental vigor, for the normal development 
of the life of the affections and for the 
wholesome education of the whole per- 
sonality, as it expresses itself in the choices 
of the will. If we talk about the conserva- 
tion of national resources in mines, or for- 
ests or water -powers, it is because all these 
resources are seen to have their value in 
relation to the lives of men, in the providing 
of adequate means and opportunity for 
the conservation and the development of 
that most precious thing which we know, 
human life. 

There is one scene in the gospels that 



70 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

seems to be an allegory of our time. It is 
the scene where Jesus took a little child 
and set him in the midst and called to the 
scholars and the philosophers, the rulers 
and the teachers, the traders and the crowd 
to look into the face of that child and said, 
''Whoso shall receive one such little child 
in My name, receiveth Me, but whoso shall 
cause one of these little ones that believe 
on Me to stumble it is profitable for him 
that a great millstone should be hung 
around his neck and that he should be sunk 
into the depth of the sea/' The child 
represents the treasure of human life re- 
ceived by men, a gift of God. Into the face 
of the child the modern world of philo- 
sophy and science, of politics and economics, 
of trade and of industry, is looking. The 
word of Jesus is being heard above the roar 
of the intervening centuries and men are 
seeking to obey His injunction. Whoever 
gives of his service in the manifold agencies 
of our time, which have for their purpose the 
conserving, the development, and the enrich- 
ment of life, is rendering Christian service. 
There are a host of these who are all 
unconscious of the sweep of the move- 



THE WORK IN EVERY FIELD 71 

ment in human life in which they are bear- 
ing a part. They think of themselves as 
related only to some petty local organiza- 
tion which is struggling against some petty 
local abuse, or seeking to establish some 
petty local betterment, and fail to see that 
this honest work of their hands and hearts 
has its place in a mighty movement in 
human life, brought about by the pro- 
jection into the world's history of God's 
thought for men, made known in the 
life and the word and the gospel of 
Jesus and being realized everywhere by all 
those who have caught something of His 
spirit or something of His message, whether 
they have seen His face or owned His 
name or not. Others there are, whose 
service is not less sincere, who recognize 
themselves simply as moving with the 
trend of the age, as obeying a blind 
instinct which comes out of mystery and 
tends toward mystery, which is part of the 
cosmic movement of things, but which they 
cannot understand, and in the service of 
which they find no joy but only obedience 
to the stem voice of unknown Duty. These 
also have a right to the joy and the fellow- 



72 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

ship of those who have learned that the 
stream of things flows out of the heart of 
God, and moves on into the joy of the 
kingdom of God. They are rendering Chris- 
tian service and we pray that the joy of 
Christian service may be discovered in 
their hearts. 

There is still another, narrower sphere 
which we recognize as more distinctively 
Christian, but which we cannot admit to 
be more truly such than the ranges of 
service which we have noted. This is the 
service of those who are proclaiming the 
Christian message, who are teaching the 
Christian ideal, who are organizing the 
means and the method of the propagation 
of the Christian gospel. A few of these are 
such as have the holy privilege of devot- 
ing all their time and strength to this 
blessed task, but the great host of these 
are such as offer freely the surplus and the 
sacrifice of their energies as their gift to 
the welfare of men. This specifically and 
technically Christian service is manifestly 
necessary and will be so until the end of 
the age. It is out of the store of this work 
that there is supplied to all the ranges of 



THE WORK IN EVERY FIELD 73 

Christian service the motive power that sus- 
tains them and continues their manifold 
operations. This distinctively Christian ser- 
vice is that of the preacher of the gospel, 
the pastor of the Christian Church, the 
priests and officials of the Christian organi- 
zation, the teachers and helpers and guides 
of specifically Christian instruction and en- 
deavor. These are they whose service is 
rendered in the power-house of Christian 
civilization. The service which they render, 
unless it is communicated, through them 
and those whom they shall touch, into the 
common life of the community, is as value- 
less as would be a power-house consuming 
mountains of coal, engaging hundreds of 
laborers, resotmding with the noise of 
crashing engines and dynamos, and send- 
ing out no power for transportation or 
industry or heat or light. Everyone has 
seen some Christian churches that seem 
thus to have lost their connection with 
life, or that seem to have failed ever to 
have established connections with life. 
Energy is being expended, ministers or 
priests are functioning, lights are burning, 
congregations are gathering and dispersing, 



74 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

but no points of contact with the life of the 
community are established, no energy is 
being poured into the great common enter- 
prises through which a Christian civilization 
is groaning and travailing to bring forth 
the kingdom of God. But it is to be remem- 
bered that while here and there a church or 
other Christian organization seems thus to 
be unrelated to the common life, we must 
not be too hasty in passing judgment. The 
lines b}^ which spiritual power is commu- 
nicated to the life of the community are 
not stretched overhead for all to see. They 
run under ground. The power that is gene- 
rated is transformed in its transmission and 
appears in some other form of energy. That 
which leaves the power-house as electricity 
burns in the lamp here as light, yonder it 
turns wheels as motive power, yonder again, 
it heats a crucible and yonder again, it 
magnetises instruments for the receipt and 
sending of viewless messages through empty 
space. The energy generated in a Christian 
church is in like manner transformed in its 
transmission. It appears in a thousand 
forms, in a thousand people, and the eyes 
of the world are for the most part not keen 



THE WORK IN EVERY FIELD 75 

enough to trace it to its source. But it 
is none the less true that it is from the 
message of Jesus proclaimed and the loyalty 
to His gospel generated in the Christian 
Church that the modern world receives the 
energy by which it moves on into the king- 
dom of God. 

Upon you who in this place are sons and 
daughters of high privilege, who seek to 
invest your lives for the welfare of men, 
who desire to have part in that cosmic 
movement by which the world rolls out 
of darkness into light, — ^let me urge upon 
you, wherever you labor, with whatever 
tools you ply your task, that you fail not 
of the high assurance that you are working 
together with God, that one is your Master, 
even Christ, and that ye are brethren with 
all those, the holy, the wise, and the good, 
who have served at His command for the 
welfare of men and for the glory of God 
in every age. Let me ask that you fail 
not to give of what God has given you for 
those great enterprises along the lines of 
which the hurts of the old world are being 
healed and the life of the age is being re- 
organized that it may conform to those 



76 COMMON FAITH OP COMMON MEN 

principles of righteousness, justice, and 
truth which the mind and heart of man is 
discerning with increasing clearness and 
integrity. Let me ask also that you fail 
not to relate yourselves to that specifically 
Christian work, the generating of power 
for the social advance, the achieving of the 
spiritual dynamic which alone can develop 
and maintain human worth and make life 
worth the living for you or for me or for 
any man. Into this, the specific service of 
the Christian Church, as one who is humbly 
grateful for the privilege of service in the 
Church, I would welcome you and bid you 
God speed. 



IV 

THE HOPE OF EVERY HEART 

The Goal of Christian Service, the 
Kingdom of God 

A German philosopher of the last genera- 
tion characterizes human history as a three- 
fold process of disillusionment. Man lives 
under the power of hope. The experience of 
life is the finding that hope is an illusion. 
The great illusion which led men through 
the earlier periods of the history of civili- 
zation was the hope of the perfection of 
personal character. This illusion character- 
ized the Greek philosophy and the Roman 
life in its noblest period. In some form it 
characterizes all pagan philosophies and 
religions. But it is only an illusion, says 
our philosopher. Man finds that perfection 
of personal character is impossible. He 
strives after an ideal which experience 
shows to him is only an illusion. Pre- 
sently his strivings grow weary and cease. 

77 



78 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

This is the reason for the deep disgust and 
loathing that fell upon the pagan world. 

The second great illusion of humanity, 
says this philosopher, is the illusion of the 
hope of immortalit}^. Men having found 
that perfection of character is impossible 
in this life project their hopes forward into 
the future. They conceive of a life after 
this life in which what has been impossible 
here shall become possible. The ideal which 
has proved only an illusion here shall there 
be firmly held within the grasp. In the 
history of the race Christianity gave vivid 
form to this characteristic human hope. It 
came to the ancient world wearied of its 
fruitless struggle for the perfection of char- 
acter in this life and offered to it the hope 
of a future life which should provide scope 
and range for the realization of the ideal. 
This new hope poured new life into the 
veins of the decadent civilization of the 
Western World. Through many centuries it 
has beckoned men on, giving to them a 
reason for the bearing of their burdens, 
the suffering of their pains, the making of 
their struggle. But, says the philosopher, 
this second great illusion is fast losing its 



THE HOPE OF EVERY HEART 79 

power to lead men onward. It is being 
found to be only an illusion and already 
the strong-minded are refusing to be de- 
ceived by the ignis fatuus of the hope of 
immortality. It will remain for long time, 
doubtless, a consolation for the poor, a 
sedative for the sufferings of the weak ; but 
as a force to move civilization it is spent. 
To the dismay of our philosopher, how- 
ever, he discovers that hope, which has 
ever been man's great deceiver, now finds 
a third form in which to lure him along the 
path of development. In this form hope 
offers to men, not the realization of their 
ideals of personal character in this life, 
nor the fulfillment of their hope of personal 
blessedness in the life to come, but it does 
offer to man the achievement on earth 
of a perfect society, which is to be realized 
through the struggle and travail of social 
forces, which in ever worthier forms are 
energizing in the common life of man and 
inspiring him with the idea of progress. 
Sadly does the philosopher view the grow- 
ing prevalence of the acceptance by man 
of this third form of the great illusion. 
With the eye of a prophet he discerns that 



8o COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

generations will come and go and centuries 
will pass before men will learn that this also 
is an illusion. He is conscious that his 
voice will be too weak to withstand the 
drift of the age. If only men would hearken 
to him, he could tell them in a moment 
what it may take a thousand years of 
experience to teach them, namely that there 
is no such thing as a perfect social order pos- 
sible among men upon the earth. What 
seems to be progress is only illusion. Some 
day in the far future men will have learned 
this and since, according to the philosopher, 
no other form of the great illusion is pos- 
sible, when that day arrives humanity will 
give up the fruitless struggle, and it is to 
be hoped, according to him, that it will 
have the good sense to conclude upon uni- 
versal suicide and so make an end of the 
horrid mockery which has dragged its 
weary length upon the stage, which is the 
world, through so many ages. 

Now this philosopher's views are ex- 
ceedingly interesting. He could find much 
to confirm his view in a study of individual 
experience. For many men life is indeed a 
process of disillusionment. Youth beholds 



THE HOPE OF EVERY HEART 8i 

high ideals and bums with passion to 
achieve them. Early manhood finds itself 
enmeshed in its errors, its failures, and its 
sins and sighs for some great deliverance. 
The hope of immortality wins the allegiance 
and the affections of many. For a time in 
religious fealty the life is given to the ser- 
vice of this hope. Presently its fires also 
bum low. The man takes a new valuation 
of himself, adjusts his mind to a new per- 
spective, gives up the hope of personal 
achievement here or hereafter, and asks 
only that he may have some small part in 
the progress of his fellow men toward the 
common good. He throws himself into 
schemes for social betterment, programs 
for social reconstruction, and for a time 
finds here his satisfaction. As age comes 
on the satisfaction somehow loses its power 
to satisfy. So many plans fail, so many 
tasks break down in the doing of them, so 
many seeming friends are proved faithless, 
that pessimism begins to shadow old age. 
The light of hope dies out and the spark of 
life sinks back into the ashes of a hopeless 
death. 

Now it certainly is true not only that 



82 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

we are saved by hope but also that we 
live by hope. I remember a visit to a 
prison. As I sat beside the warden on the 
platform of the chapel and we looked into 
the faces of four hundred fettered men, he 
said to me, ''Our hardest problem is the 
prisoner sentenced for life." '' You know,'' 
said he, ''men can't live without hope, 
and we have constantly to watch the 
'life men' lest in the insanity caused by 
despair they take their own lives or become 
raving maniacs." Life without hope is 
indeed a tragedy. Memory can never take 
the place of hope. The beauty of the bloom 
of a rose is the promise of the seed. If there 
were no seed at the heart of the bloom and 
we knew that with the coming of winter's 
cold and storm the petals would be scat- 
tered on the earth and the beauty would 
never again meet human eyes, the fragrant 
radiance of the flower would smite the heart 
with pain. Because we know that the bloom 
is a promise, that at the heart of its beauty 
there is forming the seed which shall give 
to other eyes a like delight, therefore the 
beauty of the rose brings joy and not pain 
to the heart of him who sees it. 



THE HOPE OF EVERY HEART 83 

To the superficial student the life and 
philosoph}^ of the Greek was full of joy 
and the life and philosophy of the Hebrew 
was full of sadness, but a more profound 
study will reveal the truth that the essen- 
tial sadness was with the Greek and the 
essential joy was with the Hebrew. For 
the Greek, his golden age was ever in the 
past, the progress of his life and of the life 
of his people was down and away from the 
mountains of the gods, ever out from the 
radiance of the celestials and into the light, 
the fading light, of common day. He had 
a memory, but no hope. The Hebrew, on 
the other hand, was climbing a steep path 
set with flint, but his way led onward and 
upward to the mountain of the Lord. His 
eyes yearned forth from the darkness of 
bondage and night unto the freedom and 
the light of a kingdom whose ways should 
be ways of righteousness and all whose 
paths should be peace. Therefore it is that 
there is no tragedy like Greek tragedy and 
there are no songs like Hebrew songs. The 
Hebrew had his memories indeed, but every 
memory pointed him to a hope and his 
golden age lay ever before him. 



84 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

The Christian faith confirms to man his 
hope; the Christian practice leads man on 
into the realization of his hope. We may 
accept our philosopher's analysis of the 
forms in which hope appears to the heart 
and we may gladly affirm that the gospel 
of Jesus offers to humanity hope in all these 
forms. Let us consider them not in 
the order in which they appear in history 
and experience, but rather in the order in 
which they range themselves in the per- 
spective of the mind of our time. 

The Christian faith confirms to man his 
hope in an order of human society which 
progressively approaches the ideal of broth- 
erhood. It is this aspect of the Christian 
hope that chiefly engages the mind of our 
time. For reasons which we will not 
attempt to analyze, it has come about that 
both men who are Christian and those who 
are not are increasingly interested in the 
application of Christian truth to the social 
order in the conviction that in such appli- 
cation is the secret and the hope of society's 
true progress. In this conviction men have 
made a new study of the Christian sources 
and are startled to find the pertinency with 



THE HOPE OF EVERY HEART 85 

which the principles of Jesus address them- 
selves to the problems of the social life. 
It is confidently affirmed that His precepts 
are precepts of human relationship. It is 
shown clearly that in these brief pamphlets 
which give to us the record of His life and 
message, there is a social gospel which is 
applicable to the problems and the diseases 
of modem society. It is discovered that 
there is no abuse of power or privilege 
which is not interdicted by some word of 
this Galilean Peasant, that there is no 
social vice that does not lie under the in- 
junction of this Hebrew Preacher of peace 
and good will. It is discovered, moreover, 
that there is no social disease for the healing 
of which the prescription of the principle of 
love by this good Physician of Nazareth is 
not adequate. Just how the principle is to 
be applied, just where the injunctions and 
interdictions impinge upon modem prac- 
tice are debated questions. But the Western 
World has come to feel that Jesus has diag- 
nosed the ills of humanity and that, some- 
how, in His hands there is the remedy. 

This conviction is, I believe, profoundly 
true. Jesus did come declaring the gospel 



86 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

of the kingdom of God. He Himself an- 
nounced when He declared His program 
that He had come to preach good news to 
the poor. What could this good news be 
but the announcement to the poor of the 
beginning of the end of their poverty? He 
declared that He had come to release the 
captives. What could this mean but the 
breaking of their fetters ? He declared that 
He had come to announce the recovering of 
sight to the blind. What could this mean 
but the recreation of their power of vision ? 
Now these phrases in which Jesus declared 
His mission, taken from the prophetic 
poetry of His people, when adequately 
interpreted, can mean nothing else than 
that it was His purpose to cure the social 
disease which we call poverty, to release 
man from the constraint of physical force 
to the liberty of a social order controlled 
by reason and love, and to recreate by the 
inflow of vital power the very physical 
nature of man so as to confirm to him the 
exercise of all his physical powers. On 
anything less than a puerile interpretation 
of His words, this much at least was in- 
cluded in His declaration of the Kingdom 



THE HOPE OF EVERY HEART 87 

of God, of the acceptable year of the Lord. 
There surely was reason for the amazement 
of those who heard the wonder of the words 
of grace in which He outlined so amazing a 
program. 

That He understood the amazing sweep 
of His use of the prophetic words is evi- 
denced by the kindly speech with which, 
as He sat in the synagogue of His own town 
and looked into the eyes of His kinsmen and 
neighbors, He confessed to them the limi- 
tations under which He was conscious of 
acting, in inaugurating so mighty a social 
program. One can easily fancy the pathetic 
shadow that fell over His gracious smile 
when He said, ''But of a truth I say unto 
you, there were many widows in Israel in 
the days of Elijah, when the heaven was 
shut up three years and six months, when 
there came a great famine over all the 
land, and unto none of them was Elijah 
sent but only to Zarephath in the land of 
Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. 
And there were many lepers in Israel in 
the time of Elisha the prophet, and none 
of them was cleansed, but only Naaman 
the Syrian.'' He well knew that though 



88 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

He might feed five thousand by the Sea of 
Galilee with the loaves and the fishes of 
one meal on one day, there were hundreds 
of thousands in Galilee alone, who at every 
meal on every day felt the pinch and pang 
of hunger. He well knew that though He 
might at the gate of Nain meet one widow 
and restore to her the life of her only son, 
there were, every day, through the gates of 
every village, mourners bearing forth their 
untimely dead, whom He could not meet 
with like ministry of restoration. He well 
knew that though He might strike the 
fetters of physical restrg^int from the wrists 
of one demoniac in Gadara, by restoring 
reason to its throne in the anarchic mind, 
there were among the tombs of every 
Palestinian village those who were under 
the thrall of physical force for the safety of 
their fellow men. The deeds that He 
wrought out of the overflow of His love 
which reached out through forces that we 
do not yet understand and in accordance 
with laws which are yet hidden from our 
eyes, were but symbol and pledge and 
promise of the universal work which His 
gospel is yet to achieve in all the world. 



THE HOPE OF EVERY HEART 89 

And something of the sadness of the slow 
centuries through which love must work its 
way before ever the halting hands and 
hearts of men should give the co-opera- 
tion needful for its full success fell like a 
shadow over His face on the very day that 
He announced His purpose in the syna- 
gogue at Nazareth. 

After sixty Christian generations the goal 
of the Christian's hope for the coming of 
the kingdom of God, the hope which Jesus 
Himself kindled that day in the synagogue 
at Nazareth, still hangs low on the horizon. 
Poverty is still the great social disease. We 
are only just beginning to apply to its treat- 
ment the second of three phases of the 
application to it of the Christian principle 
of brotherhood. In the matter of the pro- 
duction of wealth, we have learned the 
application of the principles of diligence 
and thrift which grows out of the teaching 
of Jesus as to individual responsibility. In 
the matter of the distribution of wealth, we 
are just beginning to address ourselves to 
the problems which can only be solved by 
the application of the principle of sacrifice, 
which grows out of Jesus' teaching of 



90 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

brotherhood. When we shall have taught 
every man in the matter of production to 
contribute to the commonwealth according 
to his ability and shall have inspired the 
commonwealth in the matter of distribu- 
tion to provide for every man according 
to his need, then we shall find it necessary 
to apply Christian principles also to the 
consumption of wealth and teach every man 
to use material things always and only for 
spiritual ends, a teaching which grows out 
of Jesus' revelation of the essential nature 
of humanity. 

Force is still the great social method. Bit 
by bit it yields to reason and love, but not 
without disputing every inch of the way. 
In the circle of the home, in the conduct of 
the schools, in the give and take of trade 
and commerce, in the social contact of indi- 
viduals, brute force has given way to reason 
through vast areas of the common life. But 
still in the civic control of the social group 
and still in the relationships of the nations, 
and still far too generally in the average 
man's philosophy of life, physical force 
remains the method of social action. The 
captives are still in their fetters and yearn 



THE HOPE OF EVERY HEART 91 

for the release foretold by Hebrew prophets 
and declared in the Nazareth synagogue. 
Physical disease, moreover, afflicts society 
as it destroys individuals. In wider and 
wider ranges of life, through larger and 
larger areas of humanity, the spirit of com- 
passion spurs man to unlock the secrets of 
nature which are remedial and to remove 
the causes of diseases by conforming the 
individual and the social life to the laws 
of the kingdom of God. That very disease 
mentioned in the prophetic word which 
Jesus, quoting, put for all physical infirmity, 
the ancient scourge of blindness, is one of 
the first to be brought under control, and 
the time is already in sight when Christian 
compassion, working through the hand of 
science, shall have virtually eliminated 
blindness from Christian civilization. But 
the task will then by no means be finished. 
One by one the physical scourges of human- 
ity are being brought under control. Bit 
by bit the waste of untimely death is being 
prevented and the purpose of the Good 
Physician is being achieved by the multi- 
tude of His followers, who too often, alas, 
are unconscious of the Master in whose 



92 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

foosteps they make their way, and so lack 
the joy of fellowship with Him in the 
achievement of His spirit in which their 
hands and thought have so large a part. 
To the Christian, therefore, the modern 
hope of the progressive realization among 
men of the ideal of the kingdom of God 
realized in human brotherhood is no illu- 
sion. He is not deceived into the dream 
of its immediate or speedy achievement; 
his Master has given him warning and he 
shares with His Master his Master's sorrow 
that the kingdom comes so slowly. He 
knows that the coming of the kingdom is 
the progressive approximation of human 
society to an ideal which will always seem 
beyond man's reach, but toward which each 
generation of honest endeavor will bring 
man nearer. He is not deceived into think- 
ing that any social order however nearly 
approaching to the formal ideal of brother- 
hood will of itself satisfy the longings of 
the human heart. He knows that beyond 
the abolition of poverty and the discarding 
of force and the achievement of physical 
well being, the real progress of human life 
into its God-purposed destiny begins. More- 



THE HOPE OF EVERY HEART 93 

over the Christian has his heart set upon the 
whole purpose of God for humanity. If it 
be his lot to give his service for the estab- 
lishment of the brotherhood in social rela- 
tionships, he is not blind to the necessity for 
the establishment of the kingdom in the 
control of the will of God over individual 
hearts and lives. He knows that the great 
hopes of humanity must be achieved to- 
gether or not at all, and while he works for 
a heaven which he knows is to descend upon 
the earth, he hopes for a heaven into which he 
knows his life will be released from the earth. 
The Christian faith confirms man's hope 
of the progressive approximation of char- 
acter to its ideal. The ideal of personal 
character is given to man in his moral 
nature, which in obedience to its own sure 
instinct constantly employs the construc- 
tive imagination to fashion before the life 
a character in which goodness shall be 
realized in manifold virtues. Reason and 
love shall rule the will and the whole life 
shall glow with the beauty which gleams 
forth when the ideal is realized. Youth 
dreams of this, youth aspires toward this. 
Manhood seldom loses every glimpse of 



94 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

this, and even if old age fails to achieve 
it, it finds its only satisfaction in the 
memory of it. 

The ideal of personal life is also given to 
man in the great ethical codes and systems 
which the common conscience of great peo- 
ples has built up under more or less con- 
scious guidance of the Spirit of God breath- 
ing upon the race. No barbarous tribe is 
without its more or less definitely accepted 
code of conduct, which is the reflection of 
its moral ideal for the personal life. In 
certain great historic ethical systems such 
ideals are recognized clearly and, to a re- 
markable degree, are reduced to definite 
precepts for conduct, as in the Confucian 
or the Mosaic systems of moral law. But 
for the Christian, the ideal of the personal 
life is not defined in an ethical code. The 
Mosaic code is a help to the understanding 
of the Christian ideal of personal character, 
but it is not a description of it, nor is it 
regulative of it. The Christian finds his 
ideal of personal character in the historic 
life of Jesus, in the record of what He did 
and of what He was and of the words 
which interpret to us the Spirit that was 



THE HOPE OF EVERY HEART 95 

in Him, which was the source of all that 
He did and of all that He was. The Chris- 
tian ever sings, 

*' My dear Redeemer and my Lord, 
I read my duty in Thy word, 
But in Thy Hfe the law appears, 
Drawn out in living characters." 

The acceptance of this Christian ideal for 
life, as it is revealed in Jesus, is, we have 
seen, the essence of the faith which makes 
man Christian. 

Now the Christian faith in which man 
finds thus his ideal of personal character, 
confirms him in his hope of the progressive 
approximation of his life to the realization 
of that ideal. His dreams and his aspira- 
tions are confirmed to him not as mere 
dreams and visions, but as the real element 
of his life. It is by these that he lives and 
as he lives so in the Christian spirit the 
dreams come true and the aspirations are 
realized. This progressive approximation 
of the Christian life to its ideal, made known 
in Jesus, was called by the old theologians 
the process of sanctification. Though we 
may use the word less often, the moral 
development which it denotes is always the 



96 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

central part of the Christian faith and 
teaching. 

He who enters upon the Christian life, 
yielding himself in obedience to its ideal 
in Jesus, finds his moral development 
hindered by his past mistakes and fail- 
ures and sins. In such a mood he is 
met by Jesus' message of God's love, which 
assures him that love in God is the same 
as love in man, and that just as love in 
man, in a halting, feeble way, has power to 
forgive, so that the lover can and does 
suffer with his beloved and so suffer for 
his beloved, and so heal the hurt of his 
beloved's wrong, so God with a perfect 
love can and does forgive sin. He can 
and does suffer with and so suffer for 
His children whom He loves, and they, 
receiving such love, find that the hurt 
of their lives which is caused by sin is healed 
by love's wondrous renewing power. This 
experience of forgiveness, which character- 
izes the beginning of the Christian life, 
blesses it also through all its course. The 
moral law for the Christian is not an ab- 
stract code of ethics decreed by fate and 
scourging through conscience those who 



THE HOPE OF EVERY HEART 97 

fail of its requirements. It is the loving 
will of God, whose Spirit ever seeks com- 
munion with the spirit of man and whose 
love, finding response in the trust and 
obedience of man, heals the wounds caused 
by man's transgression and continues to 
man the sense of humble and grateful fel- 
lowship with the Spirit of God. 

The Christian faith not onl}^ thus con- 
firms man's hope of the achievement of his 
moral ideal through the principle of for- 
giveness; it also gives unto him assurance 
of a spiritual power by which he shall more 
and more perfectly fulfill the will of God 
and so make his ideal real. If the Chris- 
tian gospel were only the revelation in 
human life of the ideal of human life de- 
clared in human history once and for all 
men, and if it gave no assurance of moral 
and spiritual dynamic to man, by which to 
achieve his ideal, it would be to him not 
a blessing but a curse. If Jesus simply 
showed man what he ought to be, and offered 
him no help to become what he ought to be, 
then He were like to a mighty mocker, appear- 
ing to heighten the despair of the world and 
to add the last poignant touch to its tragedy. 



98 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

But the truth is that Jesus came to 
assure men of the possibility of such a 
relation to God as shall continuously 
give to him the moral power to achieve 
the ideal which Jesus revealed. He came 
to call for man's allegiance to be given 
to Himself that He might place it in 
the hand of God and so relate man to 
God that the spiritual power of the Eternal 
may be received by every man who thus 
has faith in Jesus. This is the secret of 
the ethical power of Christianity as a world 
faith. Because of this relationship and of 
its possibilities, the roll of the apostles, 
the prophets, and the martyrs is a shining 
roll from which there gleams the celestial 
light of moral beauty, of ethical holiness. 
For this cause also is it true that the ten 
thousand times ten thousand of the saints 
of the common life have known the ex- 
perience of conscience quickened, of pas- 
sion purified, of the will empowered, which 
has given to their lives the deathless fra- 
grance of what the world knows as true 
Christian character. For this cause also, 
enshrined in the memory of each of us, are 
lives that have touched our lives with 



THE HOPE OF EVERY HEART 99 

heavenly blessing. They were neighbors, 
friends, or teachers; they were brothers, 
sisters, fathers, mothers. They lived, many 
of them, lives of hardship, pressed in 
by hard condition and circumstance, but 
through all their lives they kept the simple 
faith, and through this simple faith there 
was ministered to them a conscience ever 
quick and a purpose that never failed. We 
name them in the holy place of our souls 
with hushed voices, for as the years pass 
their lives were transfigured before us, the 
stains of earth were shot through with a 
heavenly radiance; their faces, seen through 
the mist of the years, are white and glister- 
ing. The power by which they thus achieved 
the ideal and are become the guiding lights 
of our lives was none other than the power 
of the Almighty, ministered through Chris- 
tian faith for the achievement of the 
holy life. 

So the Christian is confirmed in his hope 
that the holy life may be his. The lines of 
the paradox are confirmed to him by his 
faith. 

** No star is ever lost we once have seen. 
We always may be what we might have been." 



loo COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

So he is assured that moral law is not 
mockery, that the dreams and the aspira- 
tions and the hopes of youth come not to 
torture nor to betray. The moral ideal 
revealed in Jesus does not make mockery 
of life and the word that He spoke has in 
it the ring of eternal truth when He said, 
*'Ye therefore shall be perfect as your 
heavenly Father is perfect/' 

The Christian faith confirms to man also 
the hope of immortality. It is indeed an 
amazing thing that this hope should have 
persisted among men through all the ranges 
of man's life in seeming defiance of every 
word of testimony that can be received 
from material things or laid hold of with 
the senses. If this were an illusion it would 
be indeed the great illusion. But the Chris- 
tian faith comes to confirm this hope and 
to assure men that here is no illusion, but 
that this hope which has appeared under 
so many manifold forms, clothing itself to 
the imagination in such varied garments 
according to the type of life lived by the 
people in whom it has been manifest — that 
this hope is assurance of the true issue of 
life. The Christian faith gives this con- 



THE HOPE OF EVERY HEART loi 

firmation not so much by any word that 
Jesus Himself spoke as by the conviction 
which lays hold of the mind and heart as 
we perceive the quality of the life that He 
lived and as we experience the quality of 
life which faith in Him develops within us. 
The Christian doctrine of immortality is 
not, properly speaking, an expectation of 
another life after death; it is a conviction 
of the deathlessness of life. It comes to 
the soul not as the result of a specific 
promise, to be accepted blindly, that one 
may build on it an expectation. It comes 
rather as a conviction from a perception of 
what life is, from the discerning that its 
real parts are not the parts that are sen- 
sible and material but those that are spirit- 
ual. As life progressively realizes its ideal, 
as the soul of man gains dominion over the 
beast within him, which is his temporal 
environment, the conviction grows upon 
him that the death of the body is but the 
release of the soul, that the experience of 
communion with God which is possible to 
him while in the flesh, is an experience upon 
which the dissolution of the flesh can have 
no power, but which will rather from such 



I02 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

dissolution take its freedom and release into 
a progressive development which shall more 
and more experience the blessedness of the 
divine fellowship. 

The difficulties of the belief in im- 
mortality, which have forbidden many 
to have the joy of this, man's greatest 
hope, are difficulties not so much of the 
intellect as of the imagination. We have 
learned in science not to let the weakness 
of our constructive imagination hinder our 
acceptance of truth. Because we cannot 
imagine how the fourth dimension looks 
we do not therefore refuse to accept its 
hypothesis. Because we cannot conceive 
by the visual imagination the mode of 
existence of the atom we do not therefore 
deny to ourselves the use of the theory of 
the atom as we search for knowledge of 
things as they are. In like manoer, if we 
are wise, we shall not let the failure of the 
constructive imagination, in its effort to 
represent to us the mode of existence of 
life released from time and space, hinder us 
from entering into the peace and the joy 
which this hope gives to life, or from the 
exercise of the motives with which this 



THE HOPE OF EVERY HEART 103 

hope provides life. The Christian therefore 
accepts the conviction of the deathlessness 
of Hfe which is given to him by his Chris- 
tian experience. He finds that it furnishes 
him with motives which sustain him under 
trial, which give him patience under suf- 
fering and courage in the face of foes. And 
being a practical man as well as an idealist, 
he rejoices that the conviction of his spirit 
is confirmed in the conduct of his life, and 
he refuses to let the weakness of his imagi- 
nation tyrannize over his heart or his hand, 
while he cherishes the hope of everlasting 
life and purifies his heart as do all those 
upon whom this hope is set. 

The Christian then is a man of hope. He 
hopes for the kingdom of God to be achieved 
upon the earth in such a reconstruction of 
human relationships as shall conform the 
common life of man to the ideal of brother- 
hood. Having this hope he offers his life 
for the common good. He is not discour- 
aged or disheartened that the kingdom 
halts so long. He is concerned only that it 
shall halt not a moment because of the 
failure of his heart or his hand. The Chris- 
tian is a man of hope. He hopes for the 



I04 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

kingdom of God to be realized in his life, 
in the rule of its passion and its purpose 
by the holy will of God. It is his sorrow 
that, so far from the shining goal upon which 
his eye is fixed, his life struggles so feebly to 
achieve this end. With a humble and peni- 
tent gratitude he acknowledges the grace of 
God that forgives and helps, and he seeks 
to commit himself wholly to that grace that 
so his life may find its goal and through it 
the glory of God may shine. The Christian 
is a man of hope. He hopes for the life 
everlasting, for the free fellowship of the 
soul, released from the fetters of time and 
sense, with the Spirit of God in a com- 
munion blessed and eternal. He knows 
that for this the Spirit of God was breathed 
upon the race from the beginning of the 
age. He knows that this and only this can 
give rest to his own soul. For the full reali- 
zation of this he prays and he trusts while 
there are given to him, in his service and 
in his sacrifice, at his common task and in 
the hour of prayer, bright foregleams of 
that glory. This is the kingdom of God into 
which the perfect social order and the per- 
fect human life shall lead the souls of men. 



V 

THE PRAYER FOR EVERY PLACE 
The Worth of Christian Worship 

The American Meeting House as the 
home in America of the Christian Church 
is the mother of all the builded institu- 
tions that make for the uplift and the en- 
richment of our common life. The rela- 
tionship is not always confessed either by 
the mother or by the daughter. In some 
cases it lies beneath the surface of things 
and is to be traced only by him who fol- 
lows carefully the course of motives which 
work beneath the surface and appear in 
forms far different from those in which 
they were bom. 

The town hall and the state house, as 
typical of the whole group of buildings 
which give home to the civic life, are 
cherished in each city and in each state. 
For them ample spaces are provided and 
to build them the quarries have furnished 
their choicest stone and art has brought 

105 



io6 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

its richest gifts. But when these builded 
institutions of the civic life trace their 
lineage truly and clearly back to its source, 
it will be found to lie within the threshold 
of the Meeting House, for it was in the 
Meeting House, as men learned the sover- 
eignty of God, in His Fatherhood, that 
they learned also the true relationship of 
man to man in the brotherhood of the 
common life. So they came upon the truth 
that in God's purpose for the common life 
every man counts one and no man counts 
more than one, and having learned this, 
they went forth from the Meeting House 
to establish the democratic state. So it 
was that the Meeting House became the 
mother of the statehouse. The Christian 
Church the mother of the democratic com- 
monwealth. 

In every village or city and in every 
center of community life, the school and 
the college are built. For these also ample 
spaces are provided, and for these also art 
brings its treasures that they may be built 
and adorned in beauty. The school and 
the college and the university have come 
upon happy fortunes in these latter days. 



THE PRAYER FOR EVERY PLACE 107 

They are the recipients of the bounty of 
mighty states, which unlock their treasures 
in unparalleled generosity for such use. 
They have come also into the patronage 
of the great over-lords of modern industry 
and commerce, for these men have learned 
that so they provide for themselves lasting 
monuments which give something more 
than an ephemeral fame. But when the 
builded institutions of learning trace their 
lineage back truly and clearly, they will 
find that it leads them over the threshold 
of the Meeting House. It was the men of 
the Meeting House who went out from its 
doors to build the little red schoolhouse by 
its side. It was the ministers of the Meet- 
ing House who tmited their sacrifice to 
establish Harvard and Yale, and it was 
the missionaries of the Meeting House who 
joined together their vision and their ser- 
vice to establish the school which they 
called the ''Catholepistemiad'' of Michigan, 
which became in time the University of 
that state and the prototype of all those 
mighty institutions of public university 
education which are the glory of the states 
of the West. Whoever tells the story of 



io8 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

American education and fails to tell of its 
birth in the Christian Church misses the 
genius of his history. It was the men who 
in the Meeting House learned that God is 
truth and that the mind of man partaking 
of the nature of God can reach its goal 
only by the discipline of truth — it was 
these men who laid the foundations of 
American education and it is these men 
who have nourished it in its wondrous 
development. The Meeting House is the 
mother of the school and of the college. 

In every city and in every state stand 
the hospital, the refuge, and the asylum. 
These are the builded institutions of com- 
passion and kindness. They register more 
truly than any other single, visible fact the 
progress of the spirit of Christianity toward 
its rightful place in the common life. When 
these institutions for the help of men trace 
their lineage clearly and truly, they also 
will find that it leads them over the thres- 
hold of the Meeting House, for it was in the 
Meeting House that men looked upon the 
face of the Good Physician and heard from 
His lips the story of the Good Samaritan, 
and going out from the Meeting House, 



THE PRAYER FOR EVERY PLACE 109 

these men established the institutions of 
philanthropy for the healing of the hurts 
of life, the binding up of its broken hearts, 
and the wiping away of its tears. The 
Meeting House is the mother of the builded 
institutions of philanthropy. 

There are appearing also in our common 
life the institutions of social reconstruction, 
the agencies of the re-forming of the com- 
mon life that it may be fashioned after the 
order of the kingdom of God. When these 
institutions shall have builded for them- 
selves homes in our cities, or shall have 
realized more truly their purpose by the 
building of their ideals into the life of our 
cities, they also will find, if they trace their 
lineage truly and clearly, that it leads them 
over the threshold of the Meeting House. 
For it is the men who have caught the 
vision of the face of the Man of Nazareth, 
who is set forth to men in the Meeting 
House, and have heard His message, which 
is there declared, whether they have seen 
this vision in the Meeting House and heard 
this message within its walls or not, — it 
is these men who are going forth with the 
purpose to so rebuild and safeguard, light 



no COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

up and protect the ways of the common 
life, that those who go thereon shall no 
more fall into the hands of the assassin 
or the thief, but shall be safe in all their 
journey until they come to the place where 
they would be. The Meeting House is the 
mother of the institutions of social reform. 
Now all this is but a platitude of histor- 
ical sociology. The service of the Church 
in ministering to the uplift of the life of our 
Western World, and especially of our own 
land in the past, is abundantly recognized. 
There are those, however, who, recognizing 
the service which the Church has rendered 
in the past, seriously question its fitness to 
render continued service in the present and 
the future. They think of it as an institu- 
tion which has made good gifts to society 
and has made large bequests for its benefit, 
but it is their judgment that the Church 
has no longer the power, even if it has the 
will, to continue such gifts, and that the 
enjoyment of the bequests of the Church can 
be entered upon in fullness only when 
the Church itself, as an institution, builded 
in the life of the community, has ceased to 
exist. They, therefore, would divert the 



THE PRAYER FOR EVERY PLACE in 

Meeting House from its purpose as a place 
of worship and use it for other ends. They 
would make of it a historical museum in 
which to preserve interesting and instruc- 
tive relics of past times. They would 
devote it to recreation, making of it a 
theater, or a dance hall, or a gymnasium. 
They would remove it entirely and devote 
the space which it occupies to the public 
health in the form of parks and public 
squares or playgrounds. They have the 
feeling that to continue to appropriate feet- 
front on the city streets and choice spots 
in the town or village to a place of worship 
is a great economic waste which is not to 
be justified in a time which seeks "to make 
the most and the best use of its every 
resource. 

It is to be remarked that this attitude 
toward the place of worship is by no 
means new. Some twenty-five hundred 
years ago the Hebrew people who had been 
in bondage for more than two generations 
under the empire of Babylon, were released 
by the decree of the wise Cyrus who had 
succeeded to that dominion, and as many 
as desired joined a great pilgrimage which 



112 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

brought them back around or across the 
Arabian Desert to the places in Palestine 
from which their fathers had been led into 
captivity by Nebuchadnezzar. Arriving at 
the old homes of their families and tribes 
they found themselves confronted by a 
great task of physical reconstruction. There 
were old landmarks to be discovered under 
the thickets. There were vineyards to be 
reclaimed and replanted; there were olive 
orchards to be brought patiently back into 
fruit bearing ; there were fields to be restored 
to the grazing of flocks and herds; there 
were houses on every hillside to be re- 
claimed from the wild beasts and rebuilt 
for human habitation. Such tasks occupied 
wholly the hearts and the hands of this 
people, newly released from the despair of 
captivity into the hope of liberty. Year by 
year they mastered their problems and 
accomplished the work. 

After fifteen or twenty years of such 
achievement there stood one day among 
this people a man in the garb of an ancient 
prophet. He had come from some hermit's 
retreat among the hills where he had been 
born, perhaps of that remnant of the nation 



THE PRAYER FOR EVERY PLACE 113 

that had been discarded when the soldiers 
of Nebuchadnezzar led away the captives 
behind their chariots. He had lived there 
among the hills apart from the tragedy of 
the bondage of his kinsmen and apart also 
from the joy and the responsibilities of 
their release. Something in his appearance 
or his manner or the compelling glance of 
his eye arrested the attention of the people 
and when they listened he uttered this 
word of reproach, ''Is it a time for you 
yourselves to dwell in your ceiled houses 
while this house lieth waste?'' Directed 
by the reach of his gaunt arm they looked 
to the eastward where upon the hill that 
rose against the horizon they saw the heap 
of the ruins of the splendid temple of 
Solomon. Its columns lay gleaming white 
through the thickets that had overgrown 
them and the lizards crawled in the sun 
over the graven capitols that lay in heaps 
along the crest of the hill. The cedar beams 
that had been borne with the Jordan flood 
down from Lebanon lay tangled in heaps 
where the beasts had made their home. The 
torn tapestries and hangings lay rotting 
where their despoilers had cast them and 



114 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

when the eyes of the people, directed by 
the gesture of the prophet, looked upon the 
heap of the ruins, it was eloquent with 
a great reproach. 

The people, however, were not without 
their spokesmen. First came the men of 
affairs, the householders, the vine dressers 
and the shepherds. These offered as their 
defence, under the reproach of the prophet's 
words, the heavy tasks which had engaged 
their hands during the days since their 
return to Judah. They urged the pressing 
necessities which had been upon them to 
provide for a livelihood for themselves, 
their wives and their children and their 
aged folk. They averred that they had 
lacked not in a willingness to undertake 
the task of rebuilding the temple, but that 
the imperative and immediate necessities 
of providing for the physical life had been 
so great as to prevent them from under- 
taking the task of providing for the tem- 
ple's ministration to their spiritual wants. 
To put it frankly, they had had no time 
for so relatively useless an undertaking. 

Then came the men of learning, the 
lawyers and the seers, those whose duty it 



THE PRAYER FOR EVERY PLACE 115 

had become, because of their fitness for the 
task, to settle disputes among the people, 
to amuse and entertain them at nightfall 
when the day's work w^as done with stories 
and song, the men who gave their hours to 
searching out those secrets the knowledge 
of which would guide the common life, the 
men who knew the herbs and the roots and 
their remedial properties, the men who 
watched the stars and told their courses 
and read out their hidden meanings for the 
lives of those who inquired of them. These 
men had an apology to offer. They ad- 
mitted the need in the days before the cap- 
tivity of a place for the worship of God; 
they praised the faith of their fathers who 
had built the temple in the days of the great 
king, who had mingled in the processions 
that kept the holy days and in the throngs 
that had sung praises in the ample courts 
and offered sacrifices upon the great altar. 
They declared, however, that all such acts 
of piety had been performed by their fathers 
because of the natural limitations of their 
knowledge. The men of those olden times 
had lived in ignorance of the true nature of 
the world and of Jehovah. They had 



ii6 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

labored under the delusion that somehow 
the Most High God dwelt in the temple 
that human hands had built. If here and 
there a great soul had risen above such 
ignorance and such delusion, still the people 
as a whole had believed that God could be 
found only on Mt. Zion; therefore they felt 
themselves under the necessity of going 
thither to jfind Him. ''But/' said these wise 
men of the time, ' Ve have come to a wider 
knowledge. We have lived in Babylon, we 
have tasted there the learning of the men 
of the east and have found it good ; we know 
now that God, the Lord of Hosts, dwells 
not in any temple however piously or how- 
ever richly built. We know that His home 
is not on any one hill, but in every place 
where men seek Him there is He found. In 
Babylon we learned that even there our 
prayers were heard by Him and there by 
the hand of Cyrus He wrought for us a great 
deliverance." So the wise men sought to 
turn the edge of the prophet's reproach. 

Then came also the zealots among the 
people. These were the men who had 
treasured in their hearts the very words of 
the law of Moses, the songs of the sweet 



THE PRAYER FOR EVERY PLACE 117 

singers of the ancient time and the pro- 
phetic words of the mighty seers who had 
delivered the will of Jehovah in the old 
kingdoms. These men came in a spirit of 
aggression; they offered no defense and no 
apology. They arraigned the prophet on 
his own ground. They asked him to re- 
member what had been the condition of the 
worship that had been carried on in the 
courts of the temple to whose ruins He was 
pointing them. They declared that it had 
been, not the place where Israel's faith was 
nourished and proclaimed, but the place 
where Israel's faith suffered treason and 
corruption. They quoted the words that 
Amos, the rugged prophet, had spoken two 
himdred years before in the old capitol of 
the Northern Kingdom when he said, '*I 
hate, I despise your feasts. Take thou away 
from me the noise of thy songs, for I will 
not hear the melody of thy viols. But let 
justice roll down as waters and righteous- 
ness as a mighty stream.'' They remem- 
bered the words of Micah, the prophet of 
the poor, spoken in those very valleys, how 
he said, ''He hath showed thee, O man, 
what is good, and what doth Jehovah re- 



ii8 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

quire of thee but to do justly, and to love 
kindness, and to walk humbly with thy 
God/' They put in evidence the words of 
the courtly Isaiah spoken perhaps in the 
very courts of the temple itself two hundred 
years before, '' 'what unto me is the multi- 
tude of your sacrifices,' saith Jehovah. *I 
have had enough of the burnt offerings of 
rams and the fat of fed beasts and I delight 
not in the blood of bullocks or of lambs or 
of he goats. When ye come to appear before 
me who hath required this of your hands ; 
to trample my courts? I cannot away 
with; — ^it is iniquity, even the solemn meet- 
ing.' " These men, a small but intense^ 
earnest group, alleged that the real reason 
why the people had not built and would not 
build the temple, was the experience of the 
past which had shown that the temple in 
its best estate was a source of peril to the 
practice of Israel's true faith, and they 
said, moreover, that religion consisted not 
in buildings or assemblies, in acts of piety 
or deeds of worship, but in the practice of 
justice and mercy and humility in the 
common life. Therefore they denounced 
the prophet and bade him return to his 



THE PRAYER FOR EVERY PLACE 119 

hermit hut in the hills with his outlived 
theory of human duty. From the prophet 
they appealed to the prophets that they 
might silence his voice and remove his 
reproach. 

Now history records that in spite of the 
defence which was given, in spite of the 
apology which was offered, in spite of the 
appeal which was made, the people heark- 
ened to the word of the prophet. They 
arose from their fields and their herds and 
their homes, they gave of their time and 
their strength and their wealth. They 
rescued the ruins from the clutches of the 
thickets and the beasts, they lifted the 
columns till they stood upon their bases, 
they raised to their places the capitols 
carved with the lily work, they laid upon 
them the beams of cedar from Lebanon. 
They overhung all these with tapestries 
new woven with threads of silver and gold. 
Again the processions wound their way up 
the slopes of Mt. Zion, again the throngs 
of worshippers crowded the ancient pave- 
ment, again the smoke of the sacrifice rose 
to heaven and above all the songs of praise 
bore to Jehovah a people's gratitude and 



I20 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

love. Now was this only another of the 
great mistakes of nations and peoples? As 
they obeyed the commandment of the pro- 
phet, veiled in the words of his reproach, 
were they offering but another of the in- 
stances in which men act because of tradi- 
tion and sentiment, in clouds of ignorance 
guided by prejudice, rather than by the 
light of reason shining upon sure knowledge 
in the path of truth? We know that four 
hundred years after there came another 
Prophet, greater than the prophets, and 
that He, going into the courts of the 
temple, a second time rebuilt, was moved 
with indignation and took a whip of small 
cords and drove out the traders and the 
money changers while on His lips was a 
lash that cut deeper than a scourge when 
He called the place a den of thieves. Despite 
this, I cannot but think that the old pro- 
phet was right, that those who offered the 
defence and the apology and the appeal 
were wrong, that the people were right when 
they obeyed the words of the prophet and 
rebuilt the temple. For I remember that 
the Man of Nazareth said, as He stood with 
the scourge in His hands while His lips 



THE PRAYER FOR EVERY PLACE 121 

trembled with the indignation of His soul, 
'' It is my Father's house, it shall be a place 
of prayer for all peoples/' 

The issue is not one of times long gone 
by. It is an issue of to-day and of every 
day. The question is as to the need and 
the worth of common worship, as to the 
value of the exercise of what we distinc- 
tively call religious acts and practices. 
Such work and value is challenged in our 
time, as it has been in every time and as 
it will be in every time, until all men shall 
have been won to recognize its worth and 
the kingdom of God in its spiritual value 
shall have entered fully into the hearts of 
the race. The defence and the apology and 
the appeal are still made. Let us examine 
whether they be valid in our time. 

It is urged by men as an excuse or 
defence when they are charged with neg- 
lect of the place of prayer and the act of 
worship, that the pressure of material neces- 
sities on life is so great that neither time 
nor strength remains for devotion to the 
purely spiritual objects of life. Now wor- 
ship is always the devotion of man to spir- 
itual things. In the act of worship, whether 



122 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

it be in the primitive simplicity of the 
Quakers or in the gorgeous ceremonial of 
the Russian Church, the mind and heart of 
man are directed to the things that are 
spiritual. Whatever sensuous objects are 
used in worship are used only as a means 
through which the attention is directed to 
spiritual truths or principles or reality. 
The hour of worship is an hour devoted to 
what cannot be seen, to what cannot be 
heard, to what cannot be handled or felt 
or weighed. It is the uplift of the life 
directly and immediately into communion 
in the spirit with spiritual realities. It is 
affirmed, however, that the things that 
can be seen and can be heard and can be 
felt and handled and weighed are of such 
pressing necessity as to assume a superior 
importance for man, which justifies him in 
neglecting spiritual things . that he may 
attend to these material things. 

Now the pressure of modern life is cer- 
tainly exceeding heavy upon men. The 
tension of our industrial organization, its 
complexity, and its bulk are such as to 
press heavily upon every life. This was 
brought sharply to my notice of late in an 



THE PRxWER FOR EVERY PLACE 123 

experience which came to me as a pastor. I 
called upon the mother of a young woman 
who is a member of the Church which I 
serve. I asked the mother why it was that 
I had failed to see the daughter at the 
Meeting House during a considerable period 
of time. She replied that her daughter was 
so exhausted by her daily work that she 
found it impossible to attend worship on 
Sunday. She is employed in a factory fifty- 
eight hours in the week, the maximum 
number permitted for the labor of women 
in Connecticut. When Sunday comes her 
nerves are exhausted by the tension of the 
industrial process upon which she has been 
engaged, her physical strength is drained 
down by the six days labor. She must use 
Sunday in complete rest, physical and 
nervous. She remains in bed through all 
the morning; the afternoon she spends 
quietly in converse with her mother and 
other members of the family in the home. 
A few days after making this call it chanced 
that I sat at luncheon with a man who is 
high in the councils of the company in which 
this young woman is employed. He also is 
a member of the Church which I serve and 



124 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

I remarked that it was long time since I 
had seen him in his place in the Meeting 
House. He replied that the pressure of the 
industry in which he occupies a responsible 
position is so great on its business side as 
to completely exhaust him when the week's 
work is over. He feels that he is not equal 
to the task of giving mental attention to 
spiritual things on Sunday. He spends the 
day quietly in his home with his family or 
in some mild form of recreation, in order 
that his mind and nerves may be toned up 
for the pressure that will come upon them 
again on Monday morning. Now both these 
persons, the man virtually at the head of a 
great industry and the young woman en- 
gaged in one of the humblest tasks in that 
industry, make precisely the same plea. 
The plea which they make is typical of the 
position of hundreds of thousands in the 
modern industrial and commercial life. 
The day's work is heavy; it is exhausting. 
No man who knows human nature and who 
knows the modern world can fail in sym- 
pathy with those who make this plea. 

But I submit that whatever may seem 
to be the relative importance of things 



THE PRAYER FOR EVERY PLACE 125 

Spiritual and things material, it is eternally 
true that man does not live by bread alone. 
That it is by just these things that cannot 
be seen and cannot be heard and cannot be 
felt or handled or weighed, that the indi- 
vidual lives and society survives. When a 
man in the police court makes the plea 
that he cared more for bread for his belly 
or a coat for his back than for the moral 
law, ''Thou shalt not steal,'' the judge may 
have pity for the man, society may be 
stricken with compassion and shame be- 
cause of his plight, but society is right in 
thinking that any man who takes that view 
of the relative importance of things seen 
and things unseen, of things tangible and 
things intangible, is not a safe man to be 
turned loose in the common life. It insists 
that he be restrained until he see things in 
their right relations. The man who makes 
the plea when charged with buying up a 
legislature or swindling a thousand people 
out of their savings, by floating a get -rich- 
quick proposition, — ^the man who makes 
the plea that he did these things because 
a million dollars looked good to him and 
he had the power to take it, is told that 



126 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

until he sees things in their right relation 
and learns that the law, ''Thou shalt not 
bear false witness/' and the lav/, ''Thou shalt 
not steal,'' are of more worth to man than 
a fortune of a million dollars or a fortune 
of a hundred million dollars, he must live 
under restraint. For until he sees things 
in right relations and understands that the 
invisible and spiritual things of life are of 
greater worth to men than the visible mater- 
ial things of life, it is not safe that he be let 
loose among men. 

Now the plea that the material need of 
life, the business of earning a living, is so 
great as to prevent the exercise of worship, 
is based upon the same fundamental error 
in perspective in viewing the elements of 
life. Those who neglect worship are not 
guilty in the same sense in which the man 
who violates the commandment, "Thou shalt 
not steal," is guilty. But the logic of both 
positions is the same. It rests upon the fun- 
damental and false proposition that mater- 
ial things are worth more than spiritual 
things, and therefore have the right to 
demand man's time and thought and 
strength to the exclusion of his opportunity 



THE PRAYER FOR EVERY PLACE 127 

for giving time or thought or strength to 
the things that are spiritual. This assump- 
tion is not true, it never was true and it 
never will be true. In proportion as man 
develops out of savagery into civilization 
he refuses to act upon this assumption. He 
insists upon building places of worship and 
upon going to them for the practice of 
worship, and in doing so he gives evidence 
not of his folly, but of his profound wis- 
dom, and more and more all men will come 
to see this and less and less will they offer 
the old excuse that has been offered from 
the day when the first sacrifice lay upon its 
altar, the excuse that the business of life 
gives no time for prayer. 

It is urged as an apology for the neglect 
of worship by men to-day that this devo- 
tion to spiritual things in the act of wor- 
ship is unnecessary and superfluous. Men 
say that they recognize clearly that life 
rests upon spiritual things, that it is spirit- 
ual things which are of the greatest im- 
portance in life. But they affirm that these 
spiritual realities can be apprehended by 
them without the necessity of visiting the 
Meeting House or spending any time or 



128 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

strength in what we call acts of prayer or 
worship. Such practice, they say, is based 
upon the assumption that God is accessible 
only at certain times and in certain places. 
This delusion which was the natural result 
of man's ignorance is dispelled now by his 
larger knowledge. Our fathers went to the 
Meeting House to find God. We have 
learned that we can find Him at home. 
Our fathers exercised themselves in worship 
one day in the week with the notion that 
God was specially gracious on that day. 
We have learned, however, that God is in 
every place as truly as He is in the Meeting 
House, that He is gracious every day as 
truly as on the first day of the week. There- 
fore, says the modern man, let us worship 
God ever5rtvhere and at every time, not in 
some particular place and at some par- 
ticular time. 

Now it is certainly true that God is in 
every place. His presence is as truly in 
the forest as under the cathedral arches, 
as truly in the home as in the Meeting 
House, as truly in the shop as in the pul- 
pit, as truly at the desk as in the pew. It 
is also true that God is always gracious; 



THE PRAYER FOR EVERY PLACE 129 

His heart is filled with love every day in 
the week as truly as on Strnday. His ear 
is open to the cry of His children whenever 
the earnest soul lifts to Him the voice of 
the spirit. True prayer is fettered by no 
time and by no place. But this also is true 
that unless man learns to worship God 
somewhere, at some time, he does not wor- 
ship God anywhere, at anytime. The neces- 
sity for worship is not theological, it is 
psychological; it is not divine, it is human; 
it is not in the nature of God, it is in the 
nature of man. You and I can pray to 
God anywhere and at any time, every- 
where and at every time. But do we? 
The fact is that except as we patiently 
learn to worship Him in the place of com- 
mon prayer, in the fellowship of praying 
men, under the instruction and the guid- 
ance of those who have learned to pray and 
by the inspiration of the fellowship of those 
who do pray — except as we give ourselves 
thus to the discipline of prayer we do not 
pray. It is a conclusion of historical psy- 
chology that personal prayer and common 
prayer have existed always together in the life 
of the race, so that the historical sociologist 



I30 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

finds that religion has a social origin. Such 
a view is abundantly confirmed by ex- 
perience and observation. We need and 
must have the school of prayer, which is 
the common worship of the Christian 
Church, to teach us the worth of spiritual 
things and to exercise our lives in their 
grasp upon spiritual things in order that 
we may be able everywhere to find God 
and at any time to enter into real com- 
munion with Him. This is the function of 
the Meeting House as a place of worship. 
It is the school of the spirit wherein life is 
exercised and so educated to the percep- 
tion of the things of the spirit. 

There is made also to-day an appeal from 
the call of the Church to worship, to the 
spirit of the prophets declaring and defining 
what is religion. Men say that religion con- 
sists in doing justice and in loving mercy 
and in walking humbly with God; that it 
is wholly comprehended in ethics and that 
there is no use or need for the Church as a 
religious institution. Now it is true that 
religion does consist in the establishment 
and maintenance of life in right relations 
with the world and with men and with God. 



THE PRAYER FOR EVERY PLACE 131 

It is also true that we would never have 
known this had not the Church as an insti- 
tution of religion preserved in the world 
this truth and patiently and persistently 
declared in the world this truth. For just 
as the Church is imperatively needed to 
exercise and teach men in spiritual things, 
so also the ministry of the Church is im- 
peratively needed in the world to teach 
men the spiritual sanctions of the moral 
law, to confirm them in such faith and hope 
as will enable them to fulfill the obligations 
which right relationships throw upon them 
and so to achieve the destiny for which the 
race was born. 

Let it be confessed with shame that too 
often the Church has forgotten her specific 
and peculiar task, too often the Church 
has concerned itself with tithes of mint 
and anise and cummin and neglected the 
weightier matters of the law ; too often the 
Church has harbored within her bosom 
those who have proved traitors to her Lord 
and have cast disrepute upon her fair ideals. 
Yet it is to be affirmed that through all her 
history the Christian Church as a builded 
institution of the common life has been 



132 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

training men in righteousness, exercising 
them toward spiritual ideals of life, inspir- 
ing them through the fellowship of brother- 
hood to the achievement of the common 
good, the development in the individual of 
the Christ -like character, and the building 
in the world of the kingdom of God. 

Therefore I believe that in that ancient 
day the men of Judah were right when they 
hearkened to the word of their prophet and 
built again the temple. Therefore I believe 
that men have been following the guidance 
of a sure instinct of life when they have 
everywhere in spite of all excuse and in 
spite of all apology and in spite of all 
appeal, persisted in providing the place of 
prayer and the builded institution of reli- 
gion. For it is the Meeting House that bears 
witness to spiritual things in the common 
life. It is the Meeting House that exercises 
and educates men unto spiritual ideals; it 
is the Meeting House that proclaims and 
enforces with the sanctions of the soul the 
laws of those right relationships for life in 
accordance with which the city of God is 
to be builded in the world. 

It is for this reason that the Meeting House 



THE PRAYER FOR EVERY PLACE 133 

is a vantage ground of democracy. It is 
the rallying place of brotherhood. The 
idea of brotherhood has ten thousand 
lesser and other exponents in our modern 
life. These little circles are founded upon 
taste and class and caste and creed; upon 
trade and color and speech and birth. By 
all these they are limited and fail to give 
to the world the great teaching of brother- 
hood in its supreme form. It is reserved for 
the Christian Church to discharge this high 
function, to fulfill this great mission. It is 
reserved for the Church in her common 
worship to call together all men of good 
will, and to bid them as they bow together 
in common prayer to learn together the 
essential law of life and then to send them 
forth to realize that law in the manifold 
and complex relationships which they bear 
one to another. Because the ideal of this, 
her service to men, is so high, the Church 
has failed at any time or in any place to 
wholly realize it. But thank God, the 
Church has never lowered her ideals, and 
into the coming age, alone of all the insti- 
tutions of men, the Church goes with sure 
confidence, for whatever else may change. 



134 COMMON FAITH OF COMMON MEN 

human hearts will not change; whatever 
other wants may disappear, the want to 
which the Church ministers will remain. 
Men will ever need some great gospel of 
God's grace for their comfort, some clear 
word of God's law for their guidance, some 
bright shining of His purpose for their 
inspiration. In her ministry of worship 
to men may the Church never fail to offer 
these good gifts. 



MAR 29 1912 



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